Elephant ivory price ‘spiked as China VIPs snapped up thousands of kilos’

China has strongly dismissed claims suggesting that a Chinese delegation accompanying Xi Jinping to Tanzania last year purchased so much illegal elephant ivory that prices spiked.

According to a scathing report on the country’s illegal wildlife trade by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), business boomed when Xi’s delegation was in the capital city, Dar es Salaam, last March, doubling the market price of ivory to $700 a kilogram.

Speaking at a press briefing on Thursday, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, called the allegations groundless, adding that the ministry was “strongly dissatisfied” with the report. “We attach importance to the protection of wild animals like elephants. We have been cooperating with other countries in this area.”

But the campaigners EIA, who are based in London, UK, said that the Chinese president’s entourage had purchased “thousands of kilos of ivory” and later sent the load back to China.

The group pinpointed two traders at the city’s notorious ivory trading hub of Mwenge market. One was Suleiman Mochiwa, the owner of a freight forwarding service, and the other, Paulo Gavana, an ebony carver.

“The price was very high because the demand was high,” Mochiwa told undercover investigators, according to the report. “When the guests come, the whole delegation, that’s then time when the business goes up.”

A third, unnamed, trader said that the visit of Hu Jintao, who was China’s president from 2002 to 2012, to Tanzania with a large delegation in 2009, caused the same phenomenon.

“They come to take many things,” the trader said. “But that was not for Hu Jintao, it was the whole group. Then they go direct to the airport, because VIP – no one checks your bags.”

The report says that China’s demand for ivory means Tanzania is losing more of its elephants to poaching than any other African country. The Selous reserve in the country’s south has been the hotspot for ivory poaching, with elephant numbers there falling from about 70,000 in 2006 to 13,000 in 2013.

The report says that officials’ seizures of goods show that more ivory is coming from Tanzania than any other African country.

The report cites the case of Yu Bo, a Chinese national who was detained in December 2013 while attempting to deliver 81 elephant tusks to two officers from a Chinese naval task force on an official visit to the port of Dar es Salaam, in the Kurasini region.

Yu was caught at one checkpoint after paying bribes totalling $20,000 (£12,500) at a previous checkpoint, and subsequently sentenced to 20 years in jail after being unable to pay a $5.6m fine.

In November 2013 three Chinese nationals were arrested at a house in a suburb of Dar es Salaam, where 706 tusks were found.

The EIA’s executive director, Mary Rice, said: “This report shows clearly that without a zero tolerance approach the future of Tanzania’s elephants and its tourism industry are extremely precarious.

“The ivory trade must be disrupted at all levels of criminality, the entire prosecution chain needs to be systemically restructured, corruption rooted out and all stakeholders, including communities exploited by the criminal syndicates and those on the frontlines of enforcement, given unequivocal support.”

The report lays the blame for Tanzania’s ivory trade problem on “collusion between corrupt officials and criminal enterprises”, accusing rangers, police officers and revenue and customs officers of corruption.

It also highlights underfunding for the wildlife division which protects the Selous reserve. It says that agency’s funding fell $2.8m for the year, in 2005, to $0.8m in 2009, after revenue raised from safari photography trips was scrapped.

The wildlife division has one ranger for every 168 square kilometres (65 sq miles) rather than the recommended level of one per 25 sq km.

The Chinese ambassador to Tanzania this year deplored the role Chinese nationals were playing in the country’s illegal wildlife trade, saying “our bad habits have followed us”.