JBS faces European legal complaints over alleged Amazon deforestation money laundering

The Transnational Legal Coalition (TLC) has filed complaints in several European countries against meat processing giant JBS, alleging money laundering linked to illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The complaints, submitted to regulators and prosecutors in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Ireland, argue that cattle raised on illegally deforested land could be classified as assets of criminal origin.

An investigation by AidEnvironment linked JBS’s direct and indirect supply chains to more than 6.5 million hectares of deforestation in the Amazon since 1988. The TLC is also targeting financial institutions and service providers, including Barclays, Standard Chartered, Banco do Brasil, Rabobank, ING, BlackRock, EY, and KPMG, requesting investigations into potential resource transfers.

JBS has responded by stating it has monitored its suppliers via satellite since 2010. The company claims its system analyzes over 600,000 square kilometers of Brazilian territory daily to automatically block farms involved in illegal deforestation, indigenous land overlap, or slave labor. JBS also criticized the NGOs for omitting key data and stated it cannot comment without access to the study’s methodology.