Obligation of operators with regard to legality verification. Forestry operators throughout the supply chain will be responsible for verifying the legality of the products that they buy by applying due diligence, as defined in Section 7.4 of this Annex. Due diligence must be performed on purchased timber, both for the products acquired on the national market and for products that have been imported. Although the legality verification will apply to each operator, this verification must demonstrate that each timber supplier also verifies and documents the legal compliance of the timber they purchase. Information classified as confidential, such as accounting or other data, may be excluded from the due diligence exercise, as will be determined with respect to due diligence procedures during the preparatory and organisational phase of this Agreement. For each purchase of timber at each point along the supply chain, the checks carried out by operators entail verifying its validity, authenticity and compliance with the indicators that apply to the relevant supplier, including the correlation of the physical characteristics of the timber (including species and dimensions), in order to guarantee that the timber is of legal origin. If there is any suspected risk of timber being illegal, the operators must adopt risk mitigation measures before buying timber products, as defined in Section 7.1 of this Annex. If a supplier has a valid legal compliance certificate duly issued by the ICF Legality Verification Unit, the due diligence exercise may be limited to requesting a copy of that certificate. However, the operator must check the validity and authenticity of the legal compliance certificate using a specific Legality Verification Unit tool that will be developed during the preparatory and organisational phase of this Agreement. Once they have gathered the information on the legal compliance of their suppliers, operators are responsible for keeping that information up to date. The verification of compliance by forestry operators using the process of due diligence must show that: The products have been produced in a manner that meets all the requirements included in the definition of legality; and that sufficient checks are in place to ensure that the products include only timber sourced from legal operations.
