The Tin Racket

An investigation into tin mining in Indonesia, tracing how one of the world’s largest tin producers systematically sourced illegal tin - and covered it up.

I jointly reported on this story, working closely with Nike Shabrina in Indonesia, and coordinated joint publication with Follow The Money (Netherlands), Finnish public broadcaster Yle and KCIJ Newstapa (Korea).

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The investigation

The Indonesian islands of Bangka and Belitung produce nearly a fifth of the world’s tin, a metal critical to electronic devices ranging from solar panels to semiconducters. Over the last three decades, the islands have been devastated by illegal mining, leaving environmental damage that experts have valued in the tens of millions of dollars.

The Tin Racket investigated how illegally mined tin moves from these operations into the global supply chain — reaching major technology companies including Apple, Samsung and Tesla.

We interviewed miners, middlemen and employees of state-owned miner PT Timah, the world’s fourth-largest tin producer, and analysed documents from one of the largest corruption trials in Indonesian history. For seven years, PT Timah deliberately sourced illegal mined tin through intermediaries and shell companies: a scheme for which its former president director was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined $29 million.

Findings

Our investigation found that, two years after the court verdicts, illegal tin was still entering Timah’s supply chain, with middlemen openly admitting they don’t check where their ore comes from. The audits that tech companies rely on, from the Responsible Minerals Initiative’s RMAP process, failed to identify any of these problems.

The Gecko Project has since reported on Indonesia’s subsequent military-backed crackdown on illegal tin mining, which has seen around $420 million in assets seized and handed to PT Timah — the same company at the centre of the corruption scandal.

Image: Nanang Sujana