GOLD MINING COMPANIES with a recent history of environmental violations, implicated by oversight bodies in irregularities and in conflict with communities, received R$90.1 million in federal tax exemptions between 2024 and 2025, according to an exclusive survey by Repórter Brasil.
In Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso, Mineração Aricá obtained tax exemptions even after an embargo registered by Ibama (the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) as part of a Federal Police operation investigating the illegal use of mercury.
Another company with an active embargo imposed by the environmental agency is Mineração Aurizona S.A., which received the benefits after the company left 4,000 people without access to drinking water following the rupture of a lagoon used as a mining dam in March 2021, in the Maranhão municipality of Godofredo Viana.
Aura Almas Mineração S.A., which operates in Almas, Tocantins, ignored the existence of quilombola communities in its environmental licensing project, according to a lawsuit filed by the State Public Defender’s Office.
In 2024, the total tax breaks for the three companies totalled R$51 million (UDS 10,9 million). In 2025, they totaled R$39.1 million (USD 7,8 million). Data on federal tax benefits and waivers are publicly available and published by the Ministry of Finance.
Benefit laws do not include socio-environmental criteria
In the case of Aurizona, the benefit was granted through the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon (Sudam), under a law created in the early 1960s to encourage the expansion of raw-material extraction sectors in the region.
Over more than 60 years in force, Law 4,216, which regulates the benefit, has undergone few changes thanks to lobbying by the sectors that benefit from it, says Alessandra Cardoso, a policy adviser at Inesc (the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies).
“These laws usually last ten years. When that deadline approaches, they [businesspeople] organize in the National Congress and renew them without any change,” Cardoso explains. She is the author of the technical note “Tax Incentives in the Amazon,” published in 2023 by Inesc, in which she points to the “questionable economic and social effects and negative environmental impacts” of this type of tax exemption.
In addition to the Sudam benefit, the three mining companies were granted incentives under the Special Regime for the Acquisition of Capital Goods by Exporting C