A complaint has been filed with the Central Bank of Ireland against investment funds linked to the world’s largest meat company accusing them of profiting from criminal deforestation of the Amazon.
The complaint alleges the activities of the funds, managed by BlackRock asset management in Dublin, amount to money laundering.
Fourteen complaints in total have been filed in Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK simultaneously in a co-ordinated action by an alliance of legal and environmental charities, including the Global Legal Action Network which was founded in Galway.
Their key target is JBS, the Brazilian based, Dutch-headquartered multinational meat and food producer of which Irishman Jerry O’Callaghan is chairman. But they are also going after the company’s financial enablers – its banks, asset holders, lawyers and accountants.
RM Block
The Central Bank of Ireland declined to comment.
JBS did not reply but the company has defended its activities in the past, insisting it had no tolerance for illegal deforestation and had ended contracts with suppliers found raising cattle on unlawfully deforested lands.
BlackRock acknowledged questions but did not answer them. The company has been accused of unethical and environmentally harmful investments in the past and has defended its activities, but it has not been accused of criminal behaviour in relation to them before.
Complaints were also lodged with the National Crime Agency in the UK, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service and with regulators in all four countries citing nine firms of banks, investment managers, lawyers, accountants and auditors.
[ The Cop process is dysfunctional but far from rudderlessOpens in new window ]
The Transnational Legal Coalition (TLC), an alliance of five legal and environmental organisations which co-ordinated the action, said cattle ranching was the biggest driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon – most of it illegal.
It claimed there was extensive evidence linking JBS to that destruction as the company bought and processed beef raised on farms on deforested land.
[ Children can be taught about climate change without alarm or guiltOpens in new window ]
It said it followed that money made from that beef or from managing that money or investments and assets related to the activity was illegal under EU money laundering legislation.
Bláithín Quigley, TLC co-ordinator, said this was the first in a series of planned actions targeting criminal deforestation in JBS’s supply chain.
“Illegal deforestation of the Amazon is a crime, not a business model,” she said. “Indigenous communities and various civil society groups have been fighting corporate profiteering from this destruction for decades.”
Activist Alcebias Sapara, of the Coordination of the Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon, said while the destruction of forests was happening in Brazil, the crime was international.
“We seek justice in every country that, in one way or another, participates in this,” he said.
“If these criminal profits are being invested in Europe, then justice will be pursed there as well.”
