Once upon a time there was Silva Tree. Then they were exposed for making all kind of false claims, and they changed their name into Sustainable Capital Group (SCG). They had a British Virgin Islands holding company, with subsidiaries in Panama, Suriname and Mozambique.
All that seems to have fallen apart. The website of the holding company at scg.vg is down. Same goes for scgsuriname.com and scgmozambique.com. Gone. Expired. In Suriname, they were supposedly running a "sustainable timber extraction" project - read: cutting rainforest trees. In Mozambique it was something about turning palm trees into biomass pallets.
Another project by SCG principal Patrick Visser, yovivo.com, is still online but displays a Joomla set-up page. In February of last year, Visser wrote that, "Our real estate software from Yovivo should be ready to go to market soon (...)".
Not so, apparently.
Is SCG falling apart? That wouldn't be a surprise, with one principal, Maurice Sjerps, in legal trouble, charged with reforestation fraud in Costa Rica and the rest of the bunch desperately trying to shut down all the negative publicity about them on the web.
However, they do still seem to be active in Panama. The latest on their website was a story on how they are now marketing themselves using poor schoolkids because, you know, they are socially responsible so they need window dressing like that. No, they didn't build them a new school or fix the playgrounds or donate a schoolbus - they brought them a cake and a piñata:
Few of the local children receive sweets or gifts during the year and look forward to events such as Childrens day and Christmas for these rare treats.
And here's a video they proudly posted on YouTube. Draw your own conclusions.
The video has only two views!
Yes, me being one of those two….
am i the only one who sees the striking resemblance between Visser and Lurch from the Addams Family?
http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/addams-family/images/5531118/title/lurch-photo
This company with these people is a good example to see what corporate is all about. We have to understand in this country, that corporate agenda and reform is only about building business of the most corrupt and exploitative assortment, all the mélange of activities they organized is to cover their real nature, which is making profits at all cost. It is demoting to see how communities are being used, and the submission of the head teacher, who allows these undesirable individuals to take advantage of the abject poverty of those rural areas, is appalling…
Apart from everything else, I fail to understand their peculiar marketing strategy of generating as much adverse publicity about themselves as they possibly can.