Manassas, VA --(Ammoland.com)- On August 24, 2011, federal agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service raided offices and production facilities of the Gibson Guitar company.
They sent workers home and confiscated several pallets of wood along with computer files and numerous guitars (amounting to about $2 million in lost production and property).
This was the second raid on Gibson in as many years over questions about some of the wood the legendary guitar makers use in their products. The timing of the latest raid is convenient for the government as they are currently trying to convince a federal judge to indefinitely delay a lawsuit from Gibson demanding the return of some half-million dollars worth of ebony wood seized by federal agents back in 2009. No charges have ever been filed against the company regarding that raid, but the government has continued to refuse to return the seized wood which they suspected might have been illegally harvested in Madagascar.
The object of the August 24 raid appears to have been wood imported from India. Gibson says that they have been extra careful to document all of the wood they import since the 2009 federal assault and that the particular wood in question was acquired from a supplier certified by the Forrest Stewardship Council, an environmental organization set up to protect endangered trees by identifying legally harvested wood and closing markets to illegally cut products. The particular wood in question was purchased and imported from India with an extensive paper-trail from the Indian government and the US Customs Service. According to Gibson, the Fish and Wildlife Service is claiming that the wood violates an Indian requirement that wood exported from the country must be processed to a certain degree by Indian craftsmen prior to export. Gibson says this requirement was either met or waived by the Indian government as demonstrated by India’s export authorizations. The Indian government did not sanction or participate in the August raid.
Read more at Ammoland.com
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