Lessons from a Shady World

The CO2 Markets

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Amsterdam, October 15, 2025– First: a carbon credit is a tradable permit that represents one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) that has been reduced, removed, or avoided. These credits are generated by projects such as reforestation or renewable energy installations and are used in both compliance and voluntary markets to help companies meet their emission targets or voluntarily offset their environmental impact. Suriname is a potential world player and frontrunner in and on this market.

News from carbon credit land: conclusions have finally been drawn from the articles we wrote several years ago about one of the world’s largest forest protection projects: the Kariba project in Zimbabwe.

A Headache Dossier

Normally, a buyer who purchases products worth hundreds of thousands or millions of euros that turn out to be worthless takes immediate action. The buyer then demands their money back or files a damage claim. The carbon credit market works differently.

After we demonstrated in 2023 that some two hundred companies thought they were offsetting their emissions with largely worthless carbon credits from the project, few of them reacted indignantly. Instead, they removed every reference to the project from their websites. The seller of the credits, the Swiss company South Pole, also did nothing to repair the damage. The company could offer its clients new credits or refund the money, but did neither. Instead, South Pole pointed to the world’s largest certification body, Verra. It had approved the controversial carbon credits, so nothing was wrong. After all, the certification body had built in all possible safety mechanisms.

Whether and how Verra would apply those mechanisms remained unclear for over two years. It was a real headache dossier because: who should take responsibility in a voluntary and unregulated market and pay millions of euros? Could Verra, which itself was already suffering losses after a series of other and earlier scandals, find a way to restore fragile trust in the market?

Who Takes Responsibility?

Important questions, we thought. Now that governments’ climate ambition worldwide is decreasing, the controversial trade in carbon credits is resurfaces as a ‘solution.’

The EU wants to buy carbon credits to meet its climate targets for 2040, and the UN is setting up new variants of global carbon markets. But who will bear the risks?

A recent statement from certification body Verra shows that good answers to these questions can be quite difficult in practice. After two years of investigation, Verra concluded that 55 percent of the Kariba credits sold were worthless, or 15.2 million credits. “The news seems to vindicate the reporting from 2023,” wrote the trade journal Carbon Pulse.

Of the 15.2 million worthless credits that were sold, Verra hopes that owners will voluntarily withdraw 4.9 million from the market. The certification body cannot enforce this. The remaining 10.3 million credits had already been used by companies for their green claims. According to Verra, these remain valid because the certification body assumes that someone else must restore the 15.2 million credits: who else but the flamboyant businessman Steve Wentzel.

Sending Damage Claims to a Tax Haven

Wentzel was co-founder of the Kariba project together with South Pole. He did this through a company in the tax haven of Guernsey. How Verra intends to hold Wentzel accountable therefore remains unclear. Wentzel himself appears elusive. He told the trade journal Carbon Pulse that he certainly did not plan to reimburse the 15.2 million credits. At current market prices, that would quickly cost him more than 100 million euros – much more than the project earned him in total.

“Verra and possibly South Pole should repair the damage, given that they are the technical partner and seller of all credits,” said Wentzel.

So everyone points to each other, but no one takes final responsibility. We were just able to include this development and will soon dive deeper into the world of carbon credits, a system that many world leaders and CEOs rely on. But is that still sustainable?

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