“U.S., Argentine investors tied to illegal land deals, deforestation in Brazil”, 29 July 2021

... XP Investimentos joined forces with domestic competitor BTG Pactual...Together, the two banks and their subsidiaries in the U.S. would go on to sell more than 670 million reais ($129 million) in shares in one of “the largest Brazilian companies in terms of quantity of arable land”...A key part of the deal: both BTG and XP would buy up whatever land wasn’t bought by third parties. The issue, however, is that the Brazilian government has been investigating BrasilAgro since 2016 for suspected illegal land acquisitions. According to INCRA, the federal agency that deals with land ownership in Brazil, the company is suspected of acting “in breach of the law,” working its way around limits imposed on the sale of land to foreign buyers...BrasilAgro is largely controlled by investors in Argentina and the U.S...Buyers of these commodities include major multinationals such as U.S.-based Bunge and Cargill, and the Anglo-Swiss trader Glencore…Among the other shareholders in the agricultural giant that have voting rights are funds linked to U.S. banks Citibank and JP Morgan, both accused of complicity in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and its peoples, as well as Swiss bank Credit Suisse and Brazil’s Itaubank S.A., part of the Itaú financial services group…To prove that this arrangement was not illegal, BrasilAgro had to show the land titles in its name and demonstrate show that it wasn’t a company with a foreign directorship...None of the U.S. pension funds or the Argentinian investors from Cresud had responded to Agência Pública’s requests for comment by the time this report was published...There are two other noteworthy groups involved: the retirement fund for North American teachers, known as TIAA, and Harvard University...