The report explained that the DRC's rainforests were critical for inhabitants of the vast central African country.

Of the 60 million people in the DRC about 40 million depend upon the rainforests to provide essential food, medicine and other non-timber products along with energy and building materials.

In May 2002 the World Bank persuaded the transitional government in the Democratic Republic of Congo to suspend the award of new logging allocations and the renewal or extension of existing titles.

But Greenpeace said that foreign companies including German-Swiss group Danzer (Siforco), the Portuguese group NST group, Singapore-based Olam, Belgium's Sicobois and Lebanon's Trans-M had all had new contracts signed after this moratorium.

"The majority have therefore benefited from the World Bank's failure to ensure that the moratorium it negotiated with the transitional DRC government and other forestry sector reforms have been enforced."

The environmental group also said that it feared a review of logging authorisations, initiated by the World Bank, would end up validating illegal permits granted to some companies.

"Greenpeace has investigated the actions of most of the major logging companies whose contracts have been submitted to the legal review.

"Our findings expose serious lapses of governance, a massive lack of institutional capacity to control the forestry sector, widespread illegalities and social conflicts, as well as clashes with established conservation initiatives," it said.

Greenpeace said that, according to a review of the 156 contracts, 107 were signed after the May 2002 moratorium.

And nearly half of the 156 titles are in intact forest landscapes which are critical for carbon storage and very significant for wildlife protection.

Because comprehensive maps are not publicly available, the location of 13 contracts covering 1.7 million hectares -- an area the size of Kuwait -- cannot be determined, it said.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has the second-largest primal tropical forest in the world with 86 million hectares of which 60 million are potentially exploitable for logging.

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