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Welcome to the Alternative Investments Experimental Blog!

Increase your knowledge about alternative investments!
This blog mainly focus on stock market-alternative investments such as forest investments, land investments, property investments, hedge funds, forex investments, and other interesting ways of making money.

I analyze and buy alternative investments with my own money. This gives you fun reading and a guideline how to invest your own money in alternative investments by following my success and learning from my mistakes! :-)


Saturday, August 10, 2013

Teak investment Belem Sky in Brazil with Emerald Knight Consultants and Global Forestry Investments (GFI)



 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Brazil is a popular country for alternative investments. It has a politically stable environment and a fairly strong and growing economy. It is one of the top ten largest economies in the world, and one of the famous BRIC-countries with a relatively high GDP-growth.

This investment (which I made in year 2012) is in a teak plantation in Brazil. The investment broker I used was Emerald Knight Consultants, a British company specializing in providing sustainable and ethical investments with high returns. The company is only marketing investment products and the contract is signed directly with the product provider. In this case, the product provider is Global Forestry Investments (GFI), a timberland investment company focusing on sustainable forestry investments. GFI also has a long term goal to help the local community in Brazil by working together with the local government and plans to build a school for the locals. GFI has offices in Brazil, UK and Dubai.

The teak plantation is located in Belem, in the region Para north east of Brazil, and the investment project is named Belem Sky plantation. I have purchased 0.1 hectares where around 100 trees are grown, managed by GFI with partners during the investment period. The trees are already eight years old and the plan is to do the final harvest in 15-18 years. There is an option to resell the trees after three years to GFI with a capital uplift of five percent. During the investment period there will be thinning of trees (selective removing trees to improve growth rate of remaining trees) around four times, which will provide extra dividends the year after the thinning since the removed trees can be sold. The expected average return is 10% per year over the investment period.
 

 
The figure above shows the Belem area by Google maps, marked with an “A”

A few years ago I invested in another teak project, in Panama. So why do another one? Well, there are two main reasons. Firstly, if I invested in this teak project through Emerald Knights, I would get access to another more lucrative investment (more about this investment in a later blog posting). Secondly, timber has historically been a very safe investment class with good returns. The teak price has increased steadily over the past 20 years and has a broad usage within both industry and private consumer industry. Also, teak is resistant against fungus, insects, fire and challenging weather conditions, making it a sturdy timber class.

 


The photo above illustrates how timber has shown attractive returns over the years in comparison to other investment classes (figure from Emerald Knight Belem Sky investment prospect)

It all sounds pretty good but how has this investment performed this far?

I was initially excited about this investment - pretty good returns and investing in something that brings something good to the locals in Brazil. The returns from the thinning process 2012 (around 10% of initial investment) were going to be paid out in January this year. Unfortunately this didn't happen and there was no communication about it from GFI until March when I emailed them and asked for the returns... The reason was apparently that it had been severe weather in the Belem region with heavy rainfalls that had delayed the thinning process. It seemed to be a fair explanation and I would have been ok with this little hiccup in the investment process but the payment delay continued. And continued... I still haven't received the promised payment and now it is eight month delayed! GFI has come up with more reasons for the delay but all is perceived as quite unprofessional to me. Emerald Knight has recently established a specific email-address for questions related to this issue so there seems to be quite a few investors experiencing the same problem... Maybe it is the first time GFI has this kind of project and I and the others investors waiting for money are “guinea pigs”? I hope not, but it sure seems that way. GFI has promised a compensation for the delay but I will believe it the day I see the money. My wife is quite pissed at me since I invested our common money and she is nagging me about it every other day – so I really hope I will see that money soon, especially since she doesn’t want to discuss new investments until I retrieve the funds!
 
Investment summary

 



I will update if and when I receive my funds, so stay tuned and subscribe to my blog (at the top right on my blog) - don’t miss out on more interesting stories!

10 comments:

  1. It needs a lot of effort on our part to be successful in Property Investment. All we need to do is to keep doing what is right on our business and try to get something from our agents. It will be great if all that we do helps our business to reach success.

    http://investments-in-real-estate-australia.blogspot.com/2013/08/property-invesments.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am in the same situation as you and so far I have had no responses either from GFI or Emerald Knight.
    On the 13th of November 2013, I received a letter in the post from the Title Trustees requesting a reply with a number of choices:
    1. Continue to wait for payments to be made
    2. Seek alternative management for my 2 plots of land
    3. Consider appointing representatives in Brazil to pursue rental company for non-payment of sums due under the rental contracts via a law firm
    4. other courses of action

    What instructions would you suggest one give to the Trustees? Any views?

    dallasdionysios@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, I have received the same letter from TTI and I haven't answered yet. I get a feeling that it doesn't matter what we reply unfortunately, this seems to be just a communication letter to the investors in order to stall the entire payback process :-(

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  3. There is now a group of GFI investors who have set up a google group and many who are engaged with a solicitor to get our money back through the courts. There is considerable cynicism about the role of TTI
    The group is https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/GFInv
    You need to have a gmail account to access it.
    Hope this helps.
    Matthew

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Matthew, thanks for sharing this information. I am a member of the GFI Investor Group as well.

      Delete
  4. Calling all investors to join hands at www.skeeneandbowersscam.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great blog. Based on my experience, tropical hardwood investments look great on paper and then do not pay out. I have been invested in this sector in Costa Rica since 2003 and it seems to be the same scenario repeating itself all around, regardless of country and farm ownership. In my case, slack domestic demand following the economic crisis is blamed - and i have no doubt that is true. At the start, it had not really been made clear that the farm owners were solely depending on growing domestic demand beating a path to their door, which has now basically evaporated.

    On top of that, there has been the demise of Tropical American Tree Farms (TATF) in 2013. The owners owe a huge amount of promised returns from thinnings that never happened to mostly U.S. investors. The easy temptation in such cases is to run the business like a Ponzi scheme. This has given the whole industry a very bad reputation.

    Payments by the farm I invested with, Finca Leola, were pushed back until 2013 and then pushed back again, as there are simply no buyers at local trade shows. I have since come up with a plan to try to use many of the trees myself at the end of this decade, as I bought some property in Asia and plan to build two wooden buildings on it. It will cost a bundle but at least I will know these trees were not stolen from an intact forest somewhere.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, thanks for sharing your experience. Using your trees for the asian property sounds like a good use of your assets! Br Christian

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  6. The Serious Fraud Office has opened a criminal investigation into two investment schemes estimated to have lost victims around £20m.
    The SFO and City of London Police raided two properties in southeast England on Wednesday over the Global Forestry Investments and Global Forex Investments schemes. Investors in both are urged to contact the SFO.

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eb3687d8-bd9d-11e4-8cf3-00144feab7de.html

    ReplyDelete