The abuse allegations at rubber plantations supplying top tiremakers

Latex drips into buckets attached to rubber trees at the Salala Rubber Corp. plantation in Liberia, in November 2024. (Photo: Etinosa Yvonne/Bloomberg)Bloomberg | 16 April 2025

By Sarah Holder and David Fox

For years, a rubber and palm oil company that supplies some of the world’s top tiremakers has been dogged by allegations of sexual coercion at its plantations. Socfin — short for Société Financière des Caoutchoucs — says it has taken steps to improve matters, but an exclusive Bloomberg report shows those claims remain widespread.

On today’s Big Take podcast, host Sarah Holder sits down with Bloomberg’s Sheridan Prasso to discuss her investigation into why the abuse has been so hard to stop — and a new EU law that could give corporations like Socfin a big incentive to reform.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Sarah Holder: Last year, Bloomberg's Sheridan Prasso went to visit one of the biggest rubber plantations in Liberia.

Sheridan Prasso: It is a very large plantation. The total area is double the size of Chicago. It's just rows and rows, hundreds of rows, of green. Rubber trees after rubber trees, all in rows, all very symmetrical.

Holder: It’s called the Liberian Agricultural Company plantation. It's one of more than a dozen rubber and palm oil plantations in Africa and Asia owned by the European company Socfin. Socfin is far from the largest supplier of rubber and palm oil in the world, but it’s a major player in parts of Africa.

Prasso:  It is outsized in terms of its influence and in terms of its importance in the countries and in those economies where it operates. So for example, in Liberia, it is the number two producer of rubber behind Firestone, and rubber constitutes two thirds of the country's exports. So it's a huge employer and hugely important for that country's economy.

Holder: Its palm oil winds up in products from foodmakers like Nestlé. And its rubber is bought by some of the world’s largest tiremakers, including Continental, Bridgestone and Michelin. The Socfin plantation Sheridan visited in Liberia produces about 28,000 metric tons of rubber every year. It employs more than 4,000 people, including a young woman we'll call Rebecca. We’re not going to tell you much about Rebecca to protect her identity, but we can tell you she’s a mother of young children, and she works as a tapper.

Prasso: A tapper is somebody who goes around from tree to tree. They cut the bark of the rubber tree. They put a little cup on the tree — kind of like, think about collecting maple syrup. It's the same idea. It's latex that kind of drips out from the tree, goes into a cup, they coagulate that and dry it and turn that into natural rubber. That's where rubber comes from.

Holder: Like many of her coworkers, Rebecca has lived on the plantation her whole life. It’s the only employer in the area, and she depends on working there to survive.

Prasso: She grew up in an era where there were back-to-back civil wars in Liberia. She doesn't have an education. She doesn't have any money or any savings to be able to go to a big city and get any kind of other job in a restaurant or anything like that. She doesn't even have the means to leave.

Holder: Full-time employees at the plantation make $5.50 a day in US dollars. But Rebecca, like the majority of people working there, is a contract worker, which means she makes less money and has to pay more than full-time employees for food and school tuition for her children. And she’s also dependent on supervisors choosing her for work assignments each day.

Prasso: Rebecca told me that when she turns up for work in the morning, her supervisor says, you have to have sex with me, or you can't do your job today. And sometimes, she'll get a supervisor who doesn't ask that. But there's more than one supervisor who does ask that. And she's constantly, constantly just faced with the situation of, how do I feed my kids? How do I do my job? And how do I fend off the advances of this supervisor who keeps — these supervisors, more than one — who keep demanding that I have sex in order to do my job?

Holder: How often does this happen to her?

Prasso: When I was asking Rebecca these questions, I asked her, tell me about the first time he, he asked you for sex. And she said, well, he said he wanted me. And I said, no, I have my husband. And I said, I was trying to get a sense of, oh, is that just one time? And she was quiet and I said, was it more than one time? She said, yeah. I said, was it more than 10 times? She said, more than, and I said, was it more than 50 times? And she was kind of squirming uncomfortably in her chair. And she said, more than, and I said, so how many times have you been asked for sex in order to do your job? And she said, every day.

Holder: Today on the show: An investigation into persistent worker abuse at Socfin – one of the oldest rubber and palm oil companies in Africa — why it's been so hard to stop and a new law that could give corporations like Socfin a big incentive to reform. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News.

Holder: Bloomberg’s Sheridan Prasso spoke to eight women, like Rebecca, who say they face repeated demands for sex in order to work at Socfin plantations. And eight more people — including a retired schoolteacher and community advocates — spoke on the record about hearing directly from women who had similar experiences. Sheridan says, complaints about sexual harassment at Socfin sites have been been surfacing for years.

Prasso: So, starting about a decade ago, some local NGOs in various countries, including Liberia and also in Sierra Leone, started publishing reports about bad conditions on these plantations. And they brought those concerns to the management. Socfin said, well, there haven't been any reports to the police, so it seems like it maybe isn't true. And so for a long time, the company didn't take those allegations seriously because they were applying kind of a western lens to the idea that if you were raped, you were coerced into sex, or you had demands for sex by your supervisor on a daily basis, as was reported to be happening there, that you would go to the police. And that's not what happens on a plantation in rural Africa.

Holder: None of the eight women Sheridan spoke with filed a formal complaint about the sex-for-work demands they faced.

Prasso: There aren't really police to go to that people have access to, to make complaints like that. And if you do make a complaint, you lose your livelihood. You can't feed your children. And so the repercussions that these women have long faced for trying to come forward have allowed the company for a long time to not really see that there is a very deep and systematic problem at many of its plantations.

Holder: Socfin has been producing rubber and palm oil since the 1890s. It got its start in the Belgian Congo during the rule of King Leopold II.

 Prasso: Socfin is one of the only legacy institutions, one of the only producers of rubber and palm oil that's been around since the colonial era and is still operating. As countries gained their independence all throughout the 1960s in that era in Africa, it lost a lot of its holdings, but then it started regaining and expanding them into the 1990s and 2000s when there was a wave of privatization across Africa. And Socfin then acquired a whole bunch of concessions that were suddenly being privatized and at the same time countries recovering from civil wars that wanted to bring in foreign investors.

Holder: Today, Socfin has two owners. One of them is Vincent Bolloré, who is sometimes called the Rupert Murdoch of France. His fortune is worth about $9 billion — and through his holding company Bolloré SE, he’s the largest shareholder in the French media company Vivendi.

Prasso: It's a very large conglomerate, and as part of the TV, radio, and newspaper empire that he owns, he has increasingly been pushing a kind of right wing-ish conservative agenda.

Holder: Bolloré is one of the wealthiest men in France. And through his holding company, he also owns about 35% of Socfin.

Prasso: And he has long maintained that because he's a minority owner. He says he's not responsible for anything that Socfin does. And he's not responsible for its daily management.

Holder: That would be the other co-owner.

Prasso: So, the person who is responsible for its daily management is Hubert Fabri, and he's a Belgian businessman. His father was connected to the original founders of the Socfin empire.

Holder: Fabri declined to be interviewed for this story, and a spokesperson for Bolloré and for his holding company also declined to comment. Nonprofits had been raising concerns about Socfin’s labor and environmental practices for years, when, in 2016, some of Socfin’s customers started pushing for reforms.

Prasso: And Nestlé in particular, started asking for Socfin to improve some of its practices. So that pressure started happening from consumer companies that realized that things were kind of changing and that they also had to make sure that their supply chains reflected a broader commitment to sustainability and good labor practices.

Holder: Socfin agreed to partner with a Swiss NGO called the Earthworm Foundation to develop some social responsibility guidelines and assess allegations of sexual abuse and other issues. Over the years, more and more allegations came to light. And in 2023, Earthworm started conducting audits, interviewing hundreds of workers at eight Socfin plantations. At all of the plantations it audited, Earthworm found credible evidence substantiating these allegations of sexual harassment. And there were a lot of other problems, too.

Prasso: So, Socfin has long faced allegations of paying workers poorly and not equipping them fully with the protective equipment that they need for their jobs or deducting that equipment from their pay. The company has recently conducted its own audits to see if those allegations were true, and did find that in some cases, workers were still working 12 hours a day without overtime pay.

Holder: At five plantations, Earthworm found evidence to support some, but not all, allegations of labor rights and worker safety violations. The company says it’s been taking steps to remedy these issues. Lawsuits and complaints have also accused Socfin of causing environmental damage.

Prasso: Access to fresh drinking water is a problem at many of those plantations, according to the audits that have been done recently.

Holder: The company has also faced allegations of appropriating farmland and destroying villages without fully compensating the people the company displaced.

Prasso: So there are still these outstanding issues about land, about labor, about environmental issues, and definitely about sexual harassment and even allegations of rape.

Holder: Socfin has not disputed Earthworm’s findings. The company says it has taken steps to address sexual harassment, including issuing a series of action plans.

Prasso: Things like, put up a sign, “no sex for jobs,” or strengthen our sexual harassment training policy. And when I visited the plantation in late 2024, people told me that there had not been any improvement, because putting up a sign that says “no sex for jobs,” offering more training on your sexual harassment policy, or strengthening your sexual harassment policy was not the solution to this systemic problem.

Holder: A spokesperson for the company said in an email that Socfin has obtained numerous environmental certifications and has “a deep-seated commitment and drive to uphold the highest sustainability standards.” Coming up, why a new EU law could soon pressure Socfin to change.

Holder: In 2024, the European Union passed a piece of landmark legislation. It was designed to hold corporations accountable for environmental, labor and human rights violations throughout their supply chains. And it has teeth. When it goes into effect in 2027, it will allow regulators to fine violators more than 5% of their annual revenue. For context, Socfin’s revenue in 2023 was about $1 billion. That’s the last full year we have data for — because the owners took the company private last September. Bloomberg’s Sheridan Prasso says the law could have profound effects on the power dynamics between the companies that own rubber plantations and the people who work on them.

Prasso: That's a whole game changer. This is like the harshest law that's ever been passed anywhere in the world holding companies accountable for what happens at the end of their supply chains. Anything that happens that affects people, that harms people at the end of their supply chains and that they can be sued by the Rebeccas of Africa, by people in Africa who can show direct harm from the company, either negligently or willfully, allowing these bad things to happen.

Holder: How has that changed how customers of Socfin have reacted to these kinds of reports and allegations?

Prasso:   I think that the fact that all of the individual countries of Europe have to put in place their own measures that involve fines, that involve potentially in the case of deforestation, import bans. The fines are pretty substantial and the threats of lawsuits are even more substantial. I think it does seem that that is raising the sense of urgency for the end suppliers, that not just Socfin could get sued under these new laws, but Michelin, Continental, Bridgestone, and potentially even Nestlé could be sued, too.

Holder: Nestlé doesn’t purchase products directly from Socfin any more, but Socfin palm oil is still part of its supply chain.

Holder: What have these companies said so far when you spoke to them about what you found?

Prasso: Well, I mean, Nestlé says that they take supplier engagement seriously, and they work with them to try to establish best practices. Right. And they’ve, for a long time, required their suppliers to be certified as environmentally sustainable.

Holder: Sheridan also asked tire company leaders for their reactions to the sex-for-work demands at Socfin’s plantations.

Prasso: Michelin said, first of all, they said they were not aware of the sex-for-work demands that was going on at Socfin's plantation, even though they directly source from LAC in Liberia. And even though those audit results were published, including the action plans for how to deal with it, were published on Socfin's own website, but they said they weren't aware, and they, if they were aware — the CEO of Michelin told us — we would of course not be sourcing for a company that that allows that to happen. In the case of Bridgestone though, they said that they did know and that they have been working with the company since they found out to try to also improve its practices.

Holder: But Sheridan says one of the issues she found in her reporting is that actions plans and best practices on paper... often fail to translate to change on the ground.

Prasso: One of the things in particular was they set up something called gender committees. And the gender committee at each plantation is supposed to take complaints from the women and to try to figure out how to deal with issues of allegations and investigate them and see if it's true. Well, in the cases of the gender communities, the audits themselves found that many of them were ineffective. They didn't have office space. Nobody knew how to contact them, they'd never actually operated, they were just set up in name only.

Holder: It’s an open question whether the new EU law will be able to change the longstanding issues at Socfin plantations.

Holder: Have the advocates that you've spoken to who've been doing this work for a long time trying to raise awareness, do they feel hopeful about that new urgency?

Prasso: First of all, 2027 is a little bit of a ways away. And for the people who are working to improve conditions right now on the ground in 2025, two years of sex demands for Rebecca are too long to wait.

Holder: In the meantime, one plantation in Liberia has seen improvements — but not by Socfin. After Socfin sold the Salala Rubber Corp. plantation in August 2024, its new owner began addressing longstanding worker complaints, including a lack of safety equipment, medical resources and generally poor living conditions on their plantation.

Prasso: The new owner is an Indian businessman who has worked in Liberia for a long time. He goes by Jeety.

Holder: That’s short for Upjit Singh Sachdeva. Sachdeva says he isn’t aware of reports of sexual abuse or harassment and hasn’t read Earthworm’s audits. But he also says he’s committed to Socfin’s action plan.

Prasso: So Jeety came in and immediately made some improvements. And what he did was immediately renovate worker housing and then he bought medical supplies for the clinic, hospital, clinic that had been completely emptied of supplies. He ordered an ambulance. He renovated the school for the workers' children, and he started feeding the children of the 800 workers on the plantation, daily meals, hot meals at school.

Holder: Has he taken any steps to address the systemic issues that are behind the sex-for-work allegations?

Prasso: So one of the things he also did was, he changed the way that people are compensated. So instead of having to meet a quota in order to get paid, you get paid by how much you produce. That helped people not feel so strained as to try to get so much work done. Because part of the problem is that in order to get that work done, men were hiring women to do periphery chores for them.

Holder: Periphery chores like cleaning the cups used to collect latex when it drips out of rubber trees.

Prasso: But sometimes the men would say, well, now you have to have sex with me or else I'm not gonna pay you. And so that was common on the plantation. So Jeety changed that system, too. And he now employs cup cleaners as actual employees, and they get a $100 a month instead of $15 or a demand for sex. Another thing is that there was a kind of debt service that people who needed money for an emergency. And so he did away with that. If you need money for a medical emergency, you can get it for free, and then it just gets deducted from your pay, without a huge interest rate. So there are various things like that he has done to try to improve the conditions of the people. and I think, one of the things that becomes clear is that, maybe just a few management changes on some of these plantations could actually result in just a much better working system and much better conditions for work for the workers there.

Holder:  And did you get to talk to any of the women post-new leadership and did you hear about any changes in their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse?

Prasso:  When I visited the plantation in November, it had only been reopened for a week. And since then, there have been some issues about unrest still. Some people who didn't get their job back, who wanted them, or there's been it's dry seasons or there've been some wildfires. And so, the conditions now are a little bit too unstable. But we'll have to see over the longer term whether it makes a difference.