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The warring conmen at the heart of a €5B carbon trading scam

The long read: Emissions trading was supposed to save the planet. But fraudsters quickly learned how to rip the system off, making themselves spectacularly rich. Then some of the major players started turning on each other

Its web reached the boxing rings of Las Vegas, the offices of Germany’s biggest bank, the caves along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding and the gilded restaurants of Paris. Daphne told me that when Zaoui asked him for money in 2008, he had already set up a small apartment as an office in Tel Aviv and recruited a team of guys he knew to orchestrate carbon trades and funnel the stolen VAT to overseas accounts. Data put together by Frunza shows that the company made trades amounting to 65m tonnes’ worth of carbon – the same volume moved by financial giants Société General and Deutsche Bank, representing half the allowances distributed to French industries.

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