Major US trader StoneX bought illicit gold from the Amazon rainforest

Major US financial services company StoneX has bought millions of dollars worth of gold from a company linked to illegal mining, deforestation and mercury pollution in the Amazon rainforest, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and Repórter Brasil can reveal.

Documents show that one of StoneX’s Brazilian suppliers sourced gold from a vast network of informal miners from across the Amazon, including some sanctioned by Brazil’s environment agency.

The Amazon rainforest – a critical buffer against climate breakdown – is a hotbed of illicit gold production and high prices have prompted a rush of informal “wildcat” mining, which is linked to environmental damage. Investors tend to see gold as a safe bet in times of economic uncertainty and prices hit an all-time high recently amid the threat of a new trade war initiated by Donald Trump.

Although informal miners can’t export directly, major international traders can still obtain illicit gold via licensed exporters. Documents seen by TBIJ show that in September 2023, one such company, Coluna, sold StoneX a $4.6m (£3.7m) consignment of gold that included sanctioned miners among its suppliers.

The two companies were still doing business as recently as October 2024, when StoneX bought another two batches of gold for £1.2m, though it is not known whether any of this gold was illicit.

Grounded cargo

The revelations stem from an incident in September 2023 when customs officers in São Paulo stopped a $4.6m cargo of gold destined for a StoneX subsidiary in Dubai. It was held after officers at the airport found a discrepancy with the weight that had been declared by Coluna.

Coluna filed a legal challenge to release the cargo and, in so doing, revealed a sprawling supplier network of wildcat miners.

Wildcat activity surged in Brazil after Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2019 and has been linked to toxic pollution, the devastation of Indigenous lands and threats to local communities.

The problem was significantly reduced after the new Brazilian government brought in measures to tackle wildcat mining in 2023 – including the digitising of invoices, which makes supply chains easier to map.

But the origin of Amazon gold can still be hard to trace. Because wildcat miners are not authorised to export gold themselves, they sell to a web of intermediaries who supply the small number of precious metal exporters authorised by Brazil’s central bank.

“It’s very easy for illegally mined gold to enter the system,” said Ane Alencar, director of science at the non-governmental organisation Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM). “It’s important to make gold traceable,” she added.

StoneX told TBIJ it is a responsible member of the global precious metals industry and conducts extensive due diligence. The company added that it follows robust policies and processes to verify the legitimacy of origin of all precious metals it acquires, sourcing all such metals in strict compliance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements.

StoneX said the metal blocked from leaving Brazil was already in the Brazilian banking system when the company purchased it, and that StoneX collected the required certificates of origin and background documentation. It added that Coluna, which continues to export to this day, was licensed by the Central Bank in Brazil. Coluna did not respond to requests for comment.

Paper trail

The documents Coluna handed over to the authorities include almost 1,200 invoices from wildcat miners to two of the intermediaries that supply Coluna.

In total, over 12.2kg of the gold, invoiced for more than 2.9m Brazilian Reais (R$) (£474,000), was linked to environmental crimes, TBIJ and Repórter Brasil found. This is 16% of the consignment. And more than 200 of these invoices, accounting for the vast majority, came from a wildcat cooperative that was fined R$2.2m (around £350,000) in 2022 for crimes including deforestation, operating on unauthorised land and mercury use.

Mercury is used by miners to separate gold from ore, but the chemical is highly toxic and if used irresponsibly can poison local water supplies and kill wildlife. “The contaminated fish don’t just stay in the area where the mining took place either,” said Ana Claudia Vasconcellos, a researcher at the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health in Rio de Janeiro. She told TBIJ that mercury can affect areas up to 100km away.

Its use in gold mining in Brazil is only permitted with a licence and in compliance with certain national regulations. One of the cooperative’s fines related to the acquisition of 100 kg of mercury. Another detailed mercury use in the production of at least 147.8 kg of gold that breached environmental requirements.

Coopemiga, the cooperative, told Repórter Brasil that it overhauled its management at the end of 2023 and is progressively adopting safer and more environmentally responsible techniques for gold extraction. StoneX said that it understood the appropriate members of the cooperative had been held responsible following the 2022 investigation.

StoneX is a member of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), which promotes responsible sourcing of precious metals and sets industry standards for companies.

Alan Martin, its head of responsible sourcing, said: “LBMA takes all accusations regarding the improper sourcing of gold with the utmost seriousness [and] maintains strict rules for both its members and accredited refiners.”

Martin said that LBMA investigates any potential violation it is made aware of and noted that Brazilian authorities’ investigation into the blocked Coluna cargo was ongoing and had not yet found any definitive conclusions of wrongdoing. Nor had the LBMA seen any evidence of a violation of its rules for members in its own preliminary investigation. The LBMA is well aware of the sourcing challenges caused by wildcat miners in the Brazilian Amazon region and has worked to highlight the issue, he added.

A murky market

Although StoneX’s Dubai operation was the listed recipient for the seized $4.6m consignment, the gold was in fact to be loaded on a commercial Swiss International Air Lines flight to Zurich, raising further questions about the traceability of Amazon gold sold internationally. It is unclear whether or not Switzerland was the final destination.

According to TBIJ’s analysis of trade records, StoneX’s Dubai operation regularly moves gold directly from Switzerland to Turkey without going through the UAE. However, StoneX’s City of London entity transports gold along the same route, and also from the UAE to India.

Mark Pieth, a lawyer and author of the book Gold Laundering, told TBIJ that a cargo’s actual destination will often differ from its listed one. “What you have to get used to in this world of transit trade is that you have the goods going one way and the paperwork going another,” he said. In the case of Coluna’s blocked cargo, it’s unclear why documentation listed a different destination to the flight it was due to be loaded onto.

Between August 2023 and October 2024, StoneX’s Dubai division transported more than $400m (around £312m) of gold from Switzerland to refining firms in Turkey. These companies either turn the metal into bullion – high-purity gold, often stored as a reserve asset by banks – or sell it to jewellery makers.

Trade records show that one of the Turkish buyers, Ahlatci, shipped a number of gold consignments from Switzerland to the UAE on behalf of StoneX in 2023.

Ahlatci did not respond to TBIJ’s request for comment. Uguras, another Turkish buyer of StoneX Dubai gold from Switzerland, told TBIJ that only gold from LBMA-accredited refineries is allowed to be imported to Turkey, and that this and other measures ensure it sources responsibly.

Records also show that another Turkish buyer of StoneX gold from 2023 was the Istanbul Gold Refinery. Its bars are available for purchase on StoneX’s bullion website.

The Istanbul Gold Refinery told TBIJ that it has not bought any gold doré (unpurified gold bars) from StoneX from Brazil. When asked, it did not respond to requests for clarification on whether it bought gold in other forms, or how it ensured that StoneX gold bought from Switzerland could not have originally come from Brazil.

Swiss International Air Lines told TBIJ: “We ensure transportation to the highest security standards, and we always adhere to the applicable sanctions and other trade regulations.”