An international team of lawyers on Wednesday filed a coordinated battery of lawsuits against JBS, the world’s largest meat company, and its financiers, accusing them of money laundering in connection with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
The 14 legal actions, filed in four European jurisdictions, accuse JBS and its affiliated banks, asset managers, accountants and lawyers of criminal complicity in connection with the meat giant’s purchase of cattle from deforested land, in violation of Brazilian law. JBS, a historically Brazilian company, is now officially headquartered in the Netherlands, though it continues to maintain major operations in Brazil and to source much of its beef from the Amazon and neighboring ecosystems.
The lawsuits are the latest attempts by advocacy groups to open up new legal avenues to challenge JBS, which recent research has found emits as much planet-warming methane as oil giants ExxonMobil and Shell combined.
The Transnational Legal Coalition, a newly formed network of advocacy groups and lawyers that prosecutes environmental crimes and filed the complaints, says the lawsuits are the first in a series of legal efforts that will target deforestation in JBS’s supply chain. Raising livestock is the biggest driver of forest loss in the world’s largest rainforest, a crucial ecosystem for stabilizing Earth’s atmosphere and a massive harbor for biodiversity.
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