Romania, which contains some of Europe’s most important old-growth forests, passed a law in 2021 stipulating that every single truckload of wood or timber products must be photographed and recorded in the new electric tracking system — known as SUMAL — to ensure that no trees could be logged without permission and oversight.¹⁾

The ability to trace commercial wood back to the forest it came from is key to combating illegal logging, a major problem in the country in recent decades, said Ciprian Gălușcă, the coordinator of Greenpeace Romania's forest and biodiversity campaign.²⁾

“The use of photos is extremely important to ensure that a load of logs is not underestimated,” said Gălușcă. It also allows inspectors to confirm that the logger had harvested wood only from authorized species, he added.³⁾

But the Carpathian incident highlighted a key flaw in the system: It has no way of actually analyzing the uploaded images to make sure they’re unique and haven’t been tampered with.⁴⁾

Because of that, truck drivers are free to upload anything they want. OCCRP began to examine SUMAL — which has been billed as Europe’s most sophisticated timber traceability system — and quickly found images of truck tires, office chairs, and even a series of photographs of what appeared to be a drinking party.⁵⁾

Romania’s National Forest Guard lacks the manpower to check the tens of thousands of images added to the system daily, a Forest Guard analyst told OCCRP, and although police sometimes set up checkpoints like the one in the Carpathians to try and catch offenders on the spot, they can barely make a dent in the millions of wood transports that move through Romania every year.⁶⁾

Photographs are only publicly available in SUMAL for 72 hours, and the system cannot be searched by company name, but reporters managed to obtain a list of all the license plate numbers used by Silva Logistic trucks and checked SUMAL every three days for months.⁷⁾