Seized assets are being placed under the control of a state-owned giant at the heart of a sprawling corruption scheme.
The landscape in Bangka Belitung, two islands off the coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra island, has been devastated by unregulated and industrial-scale mining.
This article is co-published with The Gecko Project, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the role of land use in climate change, deforestation, the collapse of biodiversity, food security, and the rights of marginalized communities.
In early November 2025, a military helicopter descended on a strip of white sand in a protected coastal forest on the island of Bangka, Indonesia, to shut down an illegal tin mine.
The raid was part of a massive operation, announced earlier in the year by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, to crack down on illicit tin mining. In recent months, a military-backed task force has swept across the islands of Bangka and Belitung, targeting offshore dredging vessels, illegal smelters, and uncovering heavy machinery buried meters underground.
These islands, off the coast of Sumatra, are the source of almost a fifth of the global supply of tin, a commodity widely used in the tech and renewable industries. The industry was long known to be poorly regulated. But the extent of the rot became clear in early 2025, when executives at PT Timah, the state-owned firm that dominates the sector, were convicted of overseeing a multi-year, widespread corruption scheme to launder illegal tin into its supply chain.
On islands long scarred by i
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