Politico E&E News Article on JBS Features Kevin Galbraith

Our client Mighty Earth, allied with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators and a variety of other environmental and human rights advocacy groups, is waging a campaign against the behemoth Brazilian meat processor JBS. In addition to filing a complaint with the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower concerning its misrepresentation of the company’s environmental record, we are also asking the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance to carefully scrutinize the company’s offering documents related to its plan to sell shares directly to U.S. investors on the New York Stock Exchange.

A recent article explored these efforts, and featured commentary from Kevin:

“You can’t simply observe — in a plain-vanilla way — that raising beef can contribute to deforestation when your company is actively, knowingly, taking illegally deforested beef into its supply chain every day and has been doing so for years and lying about it to the investing public,” said Kevin Galbraith, a securities lawyer representing the group Mighty Earth.

“The idea that they can simply throw into a registration statement that they’re not certain that their policies can effectively control this criminal family” is insufficient or worse, he said. “What they have done here is restructure the company so that the Batistas have even more control.”

“If the agency were to go further than it has in the past and seek to block JBS’s listing, then that’s entirely justified by the fact that this, in fact, is one of the worst companies in the world,” said Mighty Earth’s Galbraith. “A fair resolution here treats them for who they are, not for who some prior company may have been.”

If you are aware of other examples of companies misleading investors through “greenwashing” claims or other false or misleading statements, please contact a whistleblower attorney at The Galbraith Law Firm by emailing inquiry@galbraithlawfirm.com or calling 212.203.1249, for a free confidential consultation and evaluation of your potential whistleblower claim. Whistleblowers can be either company insiders or outside observers who have detected and documented corporate wrongdoing.