Canadian gold miner Belo Sun accused of misleading investors

Environmental advocate: ‘No investor should even think of touching this company’

By Marisa Coulton, Financial Post

A Canadian gold miner has found itself under attack by a powerful environmental group seeking to starve it of investment dollars in an attempt to block it from building what would be the largest open pit mine in Brazil.

Toronto-based Belo Sun Mining Corp. found a rich gold deposit about 1,000 kilometres northwest of the Brazilian capital of Brasília in 2015, and now plans to build an open pit mine in the Brazilian rainforest near a bend in the Xingu River, one of the largest clearwater rivers in the Amazon basin.

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Amazon Watch first accused Belo Sun of misleading investors in a complaint to the OSC in July 2021, and last week amplified its concerns by taking advantage of the media spotlight shining on COP15, a conference with 20,000 delegates, where countries will try to come up with a framework to address the key drivers of nature and biodiversity loss over the next decade.

Belo Sun’s project would span 5,930 acres, making it the largest open-pit gold mine in the Amazon rainforest. The company has said the proposed site likely contains 3.8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $8 billion....An alliance of Brazilian and international organizations, including Mining Watch Canada, signed Amazon Watch’s complaint to the OSC, which accuses the company of deliberately “disseminating misleading and incomplete information to investors.”

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