Guest blogger Laura Kenyon from our international office reveals the latest evidence we've collected showing how Sinar Mas breaking its own commitments on protecting rainforests and peatlands.

The short answer: not likely.

In fact, not only will they not be likely to come 'clean', but today we are releasing fresh evidence that Sinar Mas's notorious forest-destroying practices continue unabated and in direct violation of the company's own environmental commitments on protecting forests and peatlands.

Sinar Mas is Indonesia's largest palm oil, and pulp and paper group. The recent KitKat campaign saw hundreds of thousands of you ask Nestlé to stop buying palm oil and pulp and paper products from Sinar Mas because of their involvement in rainforest and peatland destruction in Indonesia.

New photographic evidence shows Sinar Mas clearing rainforest in peatland areas on the island of Borneo. Further photographic evidence shows Sinar Mas has cleared rainforest that has been identified as orang-utan habitat by a United Nations Environment Program study.

Today Sinar Mas was meant to publish an audit it had commissioned into its own activities on only a small number of palm oil concessions - not on all of its operations. The release of this audit has now been postponed by Sinar Mas and its public relations company, Bell Pottinger, to August 10th. The name Bell Pottinger may sound familiar to you, as they were also hired to do public relations for Trafigura, the oil trading company who was recently convicted and fined for illegally transporting toxic waste to Côte d'Ivoire.

While Sinar Mas makes public promises to protect Indonesian forests and peatlands, it does just the opposite. In addition to these broken promises the company plans to expand its empire of destruction ever further. Last week the head of Sinar Mas's palm oil division confirmed intentions to expand into an additional 1 million hectares, including the untouched forests of Papua.

Indonesia's rainforests and peatlands cannot afford to continue to be the victim of Sinar Mas's ever expanding ambitions - after all, this is a country with one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

Recently we've seen positive steps - multinational companies like Unilever, Kraft and Nestlé have responded to evidence of Sinar Mas's destructive practices by dropping contracts. Until this company is no longer involved in destroying rainforest and peatland, other companies who still purchase from them - like palm oil supplier Cargill - should know that they are purchasing environmental destruction. Other companies (ahem, Nestlé) have already learned that this is not good for business.

With fake oil actions spilling out all over the place, it's high time someone did some skill sharing. Step up our international office with their "activist recipe for fake oil".

Basically, you mix up some molasses with some corn oil, corn starch, chocolate powder and some flour and away you go (well, there's a bit more to it than that - full recipe here).

I'm sure there are a load of other ways to make an oily recipe, but our colleagues in Amsterdam promise this one is non-toxic and non-irritating for the skin.

Finally, you smear it all over your (partially) naked body and you're ready for action.

Here in the UK you might struggle to find the backdrops to match the New Zealand photos, though there is certainly no shortage of targets!

Let us know if you have any recipes of your own that work. Here's a slideshow of recent actions from New Zealand and Belgium if you need inspiration:

How The Sun saw last week's spat between Osborne and Fox © Andy Davey

Trident replacement is looking less likely today after Chancellor George Osborne told media that the Treasury weren’t willing to stump up for the project out of central funds.

Speaking in New Delhi, where he is accompanying David Cameron on his visit to India, Mr Osborne told the Bloomberg newswire: "All budgets have pressure. I don't think there's anything particularly unique about the Ministry of Defence. I have made it very clear that Trident renewal costs must be taken as part of the defence budget."

The Treasury tried to play the comments down, saying that policy hadn’t changed and this wasn’t news. But they did confirm to us that the Ministry of Defence is now expected to pay for any Trident replacement.  

So all defence secretary Liam Fox’s efforts to get Trident excluded from scrutiny by the Strategic Security and Defence Review seem to have come to nought. It may not officially be part of the review but it's hard to see how this £97bn cold war project is going to escape strong scrutiny from a military that are facing cuts to troops and kit.

As Dr Fox put it in a TV interview earlier this month, "It would be very difficult to maintain what we're currently doing in terms of capability" if the MoD was forced to meet the capital costs of building the new submarines from within its core budget.

So Dr Fox faces some difficult choices. According to The Economist the MoD faces the potential loss of:

• whole army brigades, armoured formations and artillery units;
• maritime surveillance aircraft, Tornado strike aircraft and Harrier jump-jets from the air force;
• Royal Marines and amphibious landing ships from the navy.

And this was before they built in the tens of billions needed to cover the capital costs of Trident over the coming decade. If they opt to keep Trident, these already harsh cuts in conventional forces will have to be even more savage.

Today’s news follows hot on the heels of a new report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank which challenged the MoD's policy of always having at least one trident submarine on patrol at sea - suggesting it is no longer necessary in the absence of the Cold War Soviet threat.

Author Professor Malcolm Chalmers points out that this policy has not been reviewed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and that the conditions which brought it into being (ie fear of a surprise Soviet attack) no longer apply. Further, he contends that stopping constant patrols will allow government to delay spending tens of billions on new submarines, and ultimately to spend less.