Brazil bridles at Eliasch bid to save Amazon

Johan Eliasch is a multi- millionaire polymath from Sweden. Chairman of the Head sports company, he has skied in international competitions and produced a TV dramatisation of Lady Chatterley's Lover. He is on the board of the Centre for Social Justice and gives a lot of money to charity. Once deputy treasurer of the Conservative Party, Eliasch now works as Gordon Brown's advisor on energy and deforestation.

He has a realistic, businessman's philosophy about environmental issues. The "only way to save the rainforest is you have to make it more valuable standing than logged," he said.

So Eliasch bought up a previously dubious lumber company called Gethal and 400,000 acres of the Amazon in order to stop its destruction, and founded an NGO, Cool Earth, which encourages members of the public to spend

£35 on half an acre of rainforest in Brazil or Peru. So far, its website shows that 37,106 acres have been protected. Evidently, Eliasch is one of the good guys. But last week the news broke that Gethal was to be fined £139m for illegally chopping down 230,000 trees and lacking proper land certificates.

Gethal do not intend to pay the fine - which they say relates to a time before Eliasch bought the company - and are preparing for a battle in the courts. "Those allegations are false, fabricated and unsubstantiated…The real issue is politically motivated”, a source close to Eliasch suggested.

The political motivation is simple: Brazilians are increasingly anxious about foreigners buying up swathes of their country. The issue was reignited when a leading Rio de Janeiro daily, O Globo, referred to a speech Eliasch had made in 2006. Talking about the $75bn paid