Austria's most powerful timber dynasty built its Romanian empire on a decade of illegal logs, ghost trucks, and a system too profitable for anyone to stop.
The Schweighofer family has been cutting wood in Austria since 1642. When Gerald Schweighofer opened a modern sawmill in Sebes, in the Transylvania region of Romania, in 2003, he was extending a family tradition into a new frontier. Romania had just emerged from communism, its forest laws were weak, its officials were cheap, and its Carpathian mountains held something extraordinary: Europe's last remaining virgin forests, hundreds of thousands of hectares of ancient spruce and beech that had survived the ice age and every human upheaval since. Gerald Schweighofer, knighted by Romanian President Ion Iliescu the year after he opened that first mill, built the largest timber processing operation in Eastern Europe on top of them.
The scale of the operation that Schweighofer assembled in Romania over the following decade was, by any measure, extraordinary. By 2013, his company owned three sawmills at Sebes, Radauti, and Reci, plus two panel factories. It was processing roughly 40 percent of all softwood cut in Romania - more wood than the country could legally produce. That last figure is not an accusation; it is an architectural truth. Holzindustrie Schweighofer had constructed processing capacity that structurally required illegal supply to function.
In 2013 alone, the company's plants received 3.5 million cubic meters of timber, purchased at 70 euros per cubic meter - a total spend of roughly 240 million euros in Romanian wood in a single year. The company sourced this material from more than 1,000 separate Romanian suppliers. It audited approximately 25 of them annually. The arithmetic of that arrangement was the whole story: at that audit rate, most suppliers went roughly 40 years between inspections. Over 50 percent of all logging in Romania was estimated to be illegal.
In early 2015, investigators from the US-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) posed as foreign investors who had acquired timber cutting rights in a Romanian community forest. In meetings with Schweighofer purchasing managers - conducted under hidden camera - the investigators stated explicitly and repeatedly that they intended to cut more than their permits allowed.
The Schweighofer officials did not walk away. They offered bonuses.
For every cubic meter of illegal overage the investigators delivered, Schweighofer would pay a premium above the standard rate. The footage was unambiguous. Alexander von Bismarck, Executive Director of EIA, said the video showed the company "willingly and knowingly accepting illegally harvested timber and incentivizing additional cutting through a bonus system." The company dismissed the findings.
Five months later, Romania's Ministry of the Environment conducted its own inspection of a single Schweighofer mill and found documentation of over 100,000 cubic meters of stolen logs - at one facility, in one sweep.
The company's supplier network was documented in detail by RISE Project, the Romanian arm of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). RISE found that many of the local firms selling wood to Schweighofer were connected to former Schweighofer directors, to local politicians with criminal records, or to businessmen operating through layers of shell companies. Some had received direct loans from Schweighofer to expand their operations. The state-owned forestry company Romsilva - Schweighofer's single largest supplier - was led at the time by Adam Craciunescu, who was under indictment for corruption in a forest restitution fraud case.
A year after its first investigation, in September 2016, EIA returned to Romania and tracked logging trucks arriving at Schweighofer's mills back to their official GPS origins - required by Romanian law to document exactly where in the forest each load had been collected. For roughly half the trucks observed, the coordinates were fake.
The GPS locations listed on official documents pointed to cornfields, private homes, and cemeteries. No logging had occurred at any of these places. Romanian forest experts explained that fake GPS coordinates served a specific purpose: they erased the actual harvest location from the paper trail, making it impossible to verify whether the wood came from a protected zone, a national park, or a site that had already exceeded its cutting quota.
EIA named this investigation "The Ghost Trucks." One truck driver, interviewed separately by Romanian investigative journalists, offered a direct estimate: over five years of driving logs to Schweighofer's mills, roughly 80 percent of his deliveries had been illegal.
The violence that sustained Romania's illegal logging industry was not hidden. By 2019, six forest rangers had been murdered in Romania while attempting to stop illegal cutting. The forestry union counted over 650 violent incidents - beatings, axe attacks, gunfire - against rangers on duty. Greenpeace estimated that 20 million cubic meters of wood were illegally harvested in Romania each year, slightly more than the legal harvest.
On October 21, 2019, forest ranger Liviu Pop, a 30-year-old father of three, was shot with his own weapon while responding to a tip-off about illegal logging in the Maramures mountains. His body was found in a forest ravine. The main suspects were released without charges. One was the nephew of the local chief prosecutor.
Pop's death followed the axe murder of his colleague Raducu Gorcioaia less than a month earlier. Thousands marched in Bucharest. The European Commission threatened Romania with legal action. Gabriel Paun, director of the Romanian environmental NGO Agent Green, described the danger plainly: "The forest mafia has tried to kill me several times. They broke my ribs, cracked my head open and broke my hand."
Romania's forests were the backdrop for all of this violence, but the wood's destination was largely elsewhere. Of Schweighofer's total production, roughly 50 percent was exported to Japan. The ancient Carpathian forests were being stripped, rangers were dying to stop it, and the finished product was ending up in new houses in Tokyo.
The FSC investigation that followed EIA's 2015 report reviewed more than 400 documents over a year. Three independent auditors concluded with "clear and convincing evidence" that Schweighofer had developed a culture favouring cheap wood over legal wood, operated a bonus system explicitly incentivising illegal supply, and sourced timber from national parks it had publicly pledged to avoid. In February 2017, the FSC disassociated entirely from Holzindustrie Schweighofer.
The market consequences were immediate. DIY chains Hornbach, Brico Depot, and Leroy Merlin cut or suspended purchases. Hornbach announced it would end the relationship entirely unless certification was restored by 2018.
In May 2018, Romanian prosecutors from the Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) executed 23 simultaneous search warrants across the country, including at Schweighofer's headquarters in Sebes. The alleged criminal group included Schweighofer, several public institutions, and other companies suspected of auction manipulation, tax evasion, unfair competition, and illegal logging causing an estimated 25 million euros in damage to the Romanian state.
In January 2021, Romania's Competition Council issued fines totalling roughly 30 million euros across the timber cartel: approximately 13 million euros to HS Timber (as the company had renamed itself in 2019), 11 million euros to Kronospan Trading, and 5.5 million euros to Egger Romania. The companies had operated a price-fixing arrangement that defrauded the Romanian government of millions in timber auction revenue. HS Timber admitted to the charges.
In October 2019, Holzindustrie Schweighofer became HS Timber Group. The company invested 1 million euros in "Timflow," a GPS tracking system fitted to every truck delivering Romanian logs to its mills. It cut its Romanian supplier list from over 1,000 companies to roughly 600. In November 2021, the FSC ended its disassociation, having required the company to establish a remediation fund for Romanian forest communities, conduct an independent land review, and compensate lawful landowners where required.
EIA's position was more cautious. In a submission to the FSC Board ahead of the reinstatement vote, the organisation noted that as of 2019, HS Timber's Romanian mills were still processing approximately 1.2 million cubic meters of Romanian wood annually and that large volumes still passed through third-party log yards where traceability remained limited. Ukrainian prosecutors were separately investigating bribery payments allegedly made by an HS Timber subsidiary to that country's former forest chief, Viktor Sivets.
In 2023, HS Timber sold the original Sebes sawmill - Gerald Schweighofer's first Romanian investment, opened in 2003 - to the German group Ziegler, citing the 30 percent cap on national wood volumes that Romanian regulators had imposed in 2016 and the collapse of Ukrainian raw material imports. The Romanian operation that had once processed 40 percent of the country's softwood had been regulated and scandalized into retreat.
Gerald Schweighofer, reflecting on the Romania strategy in a 2024 interview, said: "We invested too much in one region. We should have diversified our production locations earlier. Finally, we have changed our strategy, late but not too late."
The Carpathian forests where that strategy played out for two decades are Europe's Amazon. They contain more large mammals - brown bear, grey wolf, lynx - than all other European states combined outside Russia. Between 1990 and 2011 alone, 366,000 hectares were illegally logged in Romania. The name on the company changed. The forests did not grow back.