On 9 February 2021, as government troops and Russian mercenaries pushed rebels back from Bangui, the Central African Republic (CAR) signed Decree No. 21.044. It gave a young company called Bois Rouge a forestry permit covering 186,596 hectares in the south-western Lobaye region – roughly 1,866 km² of tropical forest, an area larger than Greater London.

Bois Rouge had never logged a tree. What it had, according to the US Treasury, was a patron: the concession was granted in exchange for services the Wagner Group provided to the CAR, at about the same time Wagner fighters and government forces were recapturing territory from the rebels.

Pieced together from sanctions files, customs data and transparency reports, the story shows how Wagner turned battlefield gains into commodities – and why timber proved a poor currency for a sanctioned militia.

A Russian Company with a Central African Face

Flag of the Central African Republic

Bois Rouge SARLU was registered in Bangui in March 2019. On paper it was a local firm with a Central African boss. By October 2019, at a forestry forum in Shanghai, Bois Rouge was listed under ‘Russia’, represented by Russians Artem Tolmachov and ‘Mike’ Vdovin.

A UK parliamentary inquiry into the Wagner network later named Tolmachov as Bois Rouge’s commercial director. The research group All Eyes on Wagner found he was also paid by two other companies tied to Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin: Service K, which also financed the diamond firm Diamville, and Ferrum Mining, active in Madagascar. The pattern is familiar: a local shell in front, Russian managers behind.

The paperwork moved fast. The CAR’s 2021 report to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and a forestry sector review record the permit, PEA 193, with 137,585 exploitable hectares and a management plan approved on 28 April 2021 – less than three months after the decree. The terms were generous: the newcomer received a moratorium on concession rent and export tax, which researchers consider unlawful and which cost the state and communities revenue.

The company built its sawmill in Boda, a town government forces and Wagner had cleared of rebels shortly before the permit was issued. This sets the case apart from ordinary illegal logging. The wood was not smuggled out of a lawless forest. It was licensed by the state, as payment for war.

From Boda to Douala

The export route, as reconstructed by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), ran from Boda to the ‘Kassaï’ military base in Bangui, then by road through Cameroon to the port of Douala. A GI-TOC photograph from 7 June 2023 shows a loaded company truck at Kassaï. That logs were staged at a military base says much about who ran the business.

The Treasury lists the species exported: azobé, iroko, mukulungu, tali and, above all, sapele. Supplies flowed the other way through Broker Expert, a St Petersburg firm long used by Prigozhin, which made dozens of deliveries for Bois Rouge and, according to the Treasury, also moved the network’s money. Trade data showed hundreds of imports of Russian machinery and logging equipment.

Most timber went to Turkey, the UAE and China, but some reached Europe. Earthsight found that in 2022 the Danish firm WoodGroup ApS, a subsidiary of London-based Woodbois, took six shipments – 465 m³ of sapele worth an estimated €3.4 million at retail. One shipment was recorded as going to France’s Tropica-Bois, whose manager told Earthsight the company had never bought the wood – a discrepancy, not proof of complicity.

New Names, Same Wood

After All Eyes on Wagner began publishing in 2022, Bois Rouge became Wood International Group (WIG) and hired a new Central African director and a new Russian commercial director. It did not help. In 2023, CBS News filmed timber convoys heading from a Wagner-linked base to Cameroon and obtained about 100 WIG export documents whose details matched those of Bois Rouge.

OFAC, the Treasury’s sanctions office, designated the company in September 2023. In March 2024 the Treasury detailed its Wagner ties and sanctioned Broker Expert, after a joint probe with Homeland Security Investigations. Britain followed on 13 June 2024 (UK sanctions list; notices in the Isle of Man and Guernsey). In Douala, WIG cargo was already being held up in June 2023.

GI-TOC counts 839 m³ exported in 2022 and a peak of 5,810 m³, worth $1.37 million, in 2023 – about 3% of the CAR’s timber exports. The last shipment under the WIG name left in October 2023. In 2024 two proxies moved just 550 m³, possibly leftover stock. Renamed again as Société Industrielle Forestière, the company is inactive, according to the latest EITI report. By September 2024, satellite images showed the Boda sawmill abandoned.

Profit, by GI-TOC’s estimate, was at least $1 million, perhaps $5 million at Asian prices – far below early forecasts of $36 million. The widely quoted $890 million figure was an estimate of the forest’s total resource value, never actual income; All Eyes on Wagner later put potential earnings at about €2 million a year.

Gold fits in a suitcase; sawn sapele needs trucks, borders, ports and paperwork – each a point where scrutiny can bite.

The Next Concession

In January 2023 another firm, Forest Consulting Company (FCC), received permit PEA 194 in Sangha-Mbaéré. GI-TOC found indirect links to Wagner: FCC banks alongside Wagner-linked companies and buys chemicals from the same Chinese supplier as First Industrial Company, believed to be controlled by Dmitry Sytyi, head of the ‘Russian House’ in Bangui. Satellite images show no logging. FCC did not respond to GI-TOC. A reported successor, Ripperwood SARLU, apparently never operated.

Is this timber stolen? Legally, it was licensed. But a concession paid for with military services, in territory taken by force, on unlawful terms, fits what researchers call ‘conflict timber’. Elsewhere in Africa – Sudan, Mali, Madagascar – the network’s prize was minerals, not forests.

The Model Survives the Sawmill

After Prigozhin’s death in August 2023, Moscow began folding Wagner’s African operations into Africa Corps, run by the Defence Ministry and GRU military intelligence. In Mali the handover is complete. In the CAR it is not: President Faustin-Archange Touadéra and former Wagner commanders are resisting Moscow’s demands to be paid in cash rather than concessions and to accept direct GRU command (ISPI; Inkstick). Commanders such as Andrei Ivanov, callsign ‘Kep’, reportedly fear losing their assets and facing prosecution at home.

Claims aired in a video investigation, not independently verified, allege the Russian House network under Sytyi diverts Defence Ministry resources with the consent of Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov, who oversees Africa Corps.

Touadéra, re-elected in a disputed December 2025 vote secured by fighters still wearing Wagner insignia, visited Moscow in March 2026 to reaffirm security ties. GI-TOC describes the CAR as a key logistics hub for Africa Corps across the continent.

As for the timber, GI-TOC concludes that extraction has stopped. But the forest business was never really about wood. It was about a model – resources as payment for protection – that remains embedded in the presidential circle and among the remnants of Wagner’s Bangui team, who have little interest in surrendering it to the Defence Ministry. The sawmill in Boda stands empty. The arrangement that built it is still standing.