"Illegal gold from Amazon indigenous land ends up in Italian giant", 10 February 2022

The gold extracted illegally in the mines of the Kayapó indigenous land, in the south of Pará, fed the production of one of the biggest leaders of precious metals in Europe...

The foreign buyer of this metal from forbidden areas of the Amazon —”legalized” through fraud before going abroad— is Chimet SPA Recuperadora e Beneficiadora de Metais, abbreviation in Italian for Química Metalúrgica Toscana, a giant in the sector that occupies the number position 70 among the companies that earn the most in Italy...

To arrive at the name of the Italian refiner, the Federal Police investigated a complex criminal organization of illegal mining that operates in the south of Pará. in October with Operation Terra Desolata, when arrest warrants were issued 12, in addition to the blockade of R $246 billion from the investigated accounts. Today, three months later, the detainees are released through habeas corpus...

...Chimet told Repórter Brasil that it always buys the metal accompanied by documents attesting to its legal origin.

“The purchases in question were always accompanied by documentation that attests to the licit provenance of the metal,” he said in a statement. However, the company acknowledged “the risk that negative effects may be associated with the trade and export of minerals from high risk areas”...

The PF investigation also points out that Chimet acquires the product from the Brazilian CHM, in a partnership relationship “established for decades” through the partners Mauro Dogi and his son Giacomo, who are Italians but live in Brazil...

Between September of 2015 and September of 2020, Chimet paid CHM do Brasil the equivalent of 317 million euros (R$ 2.1 billion) in the acquisition of about a ton of the metal. The European company claims that this volume is irrelevant in relation to the total –70 tons– worked annually in the group’s factories.

CHM, in turn, bought the metal from Cooperouri (Cooperativa de Garimpeiros e Mineradores de Ourilândia and Region) which, according to the Federal Police, extracts gold from the indigenous territory...

Repórter Brasil tried to contact Cooperouri’s management, but the lawyer responsible for defending the cooperative and one of its directors, Douglas Alves de Morais, did not respond to the questions sent by the report until the publication of this text...

In a note, CHM denied that it had acquired gold from indigenous lands and said that its acquisitions were made “from cooperatives able to mine in their respective areas” that always “presented the documentation legally required and necessary to carry out its activities”...