The story
Hoang Anh Gia Lai was set up in 1990 as a small factory in Pleiku producing furniture and employing 200 workers. Another wood processing plant was added in 1993 in the suburbs of Pleiku. The company diversified into granite processing in 2002 and later real estate and hotels.
HAGL was registered as a joint stock company in 2006.
Controversy
HAGL has been accused of razing indigenous lands in Cambodia during the COVID-19 crisis when the nearby villages, which depend on local resources in the ancestral forests for their livelihoods, were in lockdown. In March 2019, the governor of Ratanakiri province in Cambodia requested that the national Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries return 742 hectares of customary land wrongly included in HAGL's agricultural land concessions to 12 local communities following a demarcation process that began in 2018.
HAGL appealed, arguing that 150 hectares of the 742 hectares had already been cleared and planted and should therefore remain within its concession. But as coronavirus delayed the ministry's decision, the firm bulldozed another 45 hectares of indigenous territory, laying waste to two spirit mountains, wetlands, old-growth forest as well as traditional hunting areas and burial grounds of spiritual value to the villagers.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3