Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, windle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Ragi.

Today we're speaking with two analysts from C4 ADS about the financial, environmental, and social cost of illegal teak logging in South Sudan.

Sessi Neumeister is a senior analyst in the natural resources cell,

focusing on illegal logging, deforestation, and their convergence with other illicit activity.

Stella Cooper is a senior analyst on the conflict finance and irregular threat cell

focused on weapons trafficking, natural resources, and illicit financial flows in South Sudan.

Together they wrote the fascinating recent report, Money Tree, Teak and Conflict in South Sudan.

Sassie and Stella, thanks so much for joining me.

What do you start by describing what prompted you to look into this issue?

To start out, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background on

C480S generally, since I think it's helpful to understand why we would be looking into this. C480s is a

nonpartisan and nonprofit organization based here in Washington, D.C. We use technology and publicly

available information to map and disrupt transnational

licit networks. We look at the intersections of wildlife, grand corruption, conflict finance,

money laundering, and natural resource crime as they transit global borders.

And across all of that work, what we are attempting to do is introduce cutting-edge technology and leverage

open source or publicly available information to better understand those issues, which with all of

those resources leads us to how we ended up writing the report money tree. We began looking at

Tiken South Sudan while I was doing some work looking at conflict finance generally

in South Sudan, and throughout a lot of conversations in how conflict is being funded, Teak was

always mentioned as an aside. Timber products would come up as, you know, something that was on

...