Nemus Earth doesn’t own the land in Brazil that is linked to its sales of NFTs

“The property Nemus used for the Genesis Drop is currently under litigation”

“We call it the quadruple bottom line,” says Maurizio Totta in a 2021 interview.

“Because we protect the biodiversity and the forest locally by avoiding that the forest is burned down. We protect the climate globally by avoiding CO₂ emissions, or even afterward the methane emissions from the cows that would be grazing on those cleared lands. We do something, the third bottom line is the social impact by giving sustainable jobs and good income to the local population and the fourth bottom line, well, the investor should have something for his efforts and I think there is nothing wrong in making money while providing so many good effects with your investment.”

It all sounds great. But the reality of at least one of the projects that Totta is involved with in Brazil is far less rosy.

From 1995 to 2008, Totta was CEO of one of Europe’s largest shopping malls, Shopping City Süd, near Vienna. Since 2010, he’s focussed on impact investing.

Totta is director of a company called ASF Brazil Ltd that was incorporated in the UK on 12 February 2019. ASF stands for Amazon Sustainable Forestry. It’s a logging company.

Flávio de Meira Penna is a founder and investor in ASF, which he describes as “a US$50 million private investment venture”. Meira Penna incorporated Amazon Sustainable Forestry Management LLC in Florida on 22 July 2021.

InfoAmazonia reports that in April 2023, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) targeted another of Meira Penna’s logging companies, Laminados Triunfo, in a timber laundering investigation.

Flávio de Meira Penna also a director, along with Totta, in another company incorporated in the UK called Agrinlog UK Holdings Limited.

And Meira Penna is founder, CEO, and controlling shareholder of a company called Nemus. The company Nemus Holdings LLC was incorporated in the tax and secrecy haven of Delaware on 4 May 2021. Meira Penna incorporated a branch company in Florida on 16 August 2021.

A recent article by Fábio Bispo for InfoAmazonia states that,

Nemus’ businesses are associated with European investors and ASF BRAZIL LTD, a London-based holding company founded by Italian businessman Maurizio Totta. In Brazil, Totta is a partner of Pedro Ruhs da Silva and Flávio Meira Penna, who appear as owners of Nemus and other companies in partnership with ASF. The group’s main investments in the Amazon are focused on timber extraction, with the recovery of bankrupt or indebted companies.

While ASF is a logging company, focussed on profiting from cutting down trees in the Amazon, the goal of Nemus, at least according to Meira Penna, is “to create a sustainable model for preserving (and restoring) the Rainforest by bridging our physical world with the world of cryptocurrency”.

Nemus Earth: Crypto, NFTs, and carbon credits

REDD-Monitor first wrote about Nemus in March 2022. The company promised that by buying non-fungible tokens (NFTs) linked to areas of Amazon rainforest, anyone could become a “Guardian of the Amazon Rainforest”:

Nemus plans to buy a vast area of the Amazon to create a “protective belt” more than 2,000 kilometres long and more than 100 kilometres wide. And predictably enough, Nemus plans to generate carbon credits from its NFT-funded land grab.

Nemus started its operations with an area of 41,000 hectares. In July 2022, Nemus announced the World’s first “Non-Fungible Territory”.

Days later, Brazil’s Federal Prosecution Office (MPF) issued a notice giving Nemus 15 days to prove that the land actually belongs to the company. Nemus also had to show authorisation from the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI), or any other public body, permitting the company to operate in the area:

In August 2022, Nemus wrote that it had provided the information requested and stated that,

Since Nemus’ soon to be finalized acquisition of land is not located on, nor encompasses indigenous land or preserve, there is no violation of indigenous rights and/or laws and regulations.

By November 2022, Nemus acknowledged that Indigenous Peoples live on their land, writing that:

Nemus has worked hard to build trust with the Indigenous populations that are within and around the Nemus property, and have an immense amount of respect for both their struggles and triumphs in their homeland.

But in a 2022 interview with a YouTube channel called Break It Down Show, Meira Penna called the Indigenous People living on the land “squatters”:

“In the property that we purchased, it’s 41,000 hectares, about 100,000 acres, there are three small Indigenous communities that, for all intents and purposes they’re sort of like squatters on our land, but they will live there forever, that’s how we want to work with them.”

In December 2022, Thomson Reuters Foundation reported that Brazilian prosecutors had told Nemus to stop selling NFTs and not to contact the Indigenous Peoples living in the 41,000 hectares that Nemus claims to control.

The Apurinã Indigenous People who live on the land accuse Nemus of dividing the Indigenous Peoples living there. “From the moment Nemus arrived, it started to divide people,” Makupanari Apurinã told Vice. “They say they are bringing people together but it is a lie, they are actually dividing us apart.”

No free, prior and informed consent

In September 2023, Fábio Bispo travelled with a team of InfoAmazonia reporters to the Purus River Basin in southern Amazonas to meet the Apurinã Indigenous People who live in and around the Nemus NFT project area.

Chief Kaiaxi told Bispo that he was not aware that Nemus was selling NFTs linked to plots of land in his village, but he said that Nemus had been in the area claiming to own the land.

Nemus claims to have bought the land from a logging company called Manasa Madeireira Nacional S.A.(Manasa). In 2019, Manasa was top of a list, compiled by federal prosecutors, of companies responsible for illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

Nemus has plans to harvest from 200,000 Brazil nut trees established as a plantation 40 years ago. Nemus aims to build a processing plant, build roads, and build landing strips for aeroplanes. Nemus has bought a boat for the Amazonas State Police in the municipality of Pauini, and given the Apurinã a small chain saw and a brush cutter to cut trails to the Brazil nut trees. Nemus has also provided a generator to one of the communities in the project area.

Chief Kaiaxi told InfoAmazonia that “What we want is for our territory to be demarcated so we feel safer.” This is in dramatic contrast to Meira Penna’s description of the Indigenous People as “squatters” on his company’s land.

No process of free, prior and informed consent was carried out with the Indigenous communities living in and around the land that Nemus is using to generate its NFTs. In July 2022, Brazilian prosecutors stated that as such Nemus was in breach of Convention 169 of the International Labour Organisation.

In a letter sent to the Brazilian prosecutors, dated 3 August 2022, Meira Penna states that Nemus Participações SA is a Brazilian company, registered in São Paulo:

It is important to highlight that, to date, we have not yet started any economic activity in the region, with the project still in the structuring phase and finalizing the acquisition of the property in the municipality of Pauiní.

Yet Nemus launched its sales of NFTs in March 2022.

Chief Teixeira de Sousa Lopes Apurinã lives in Kamarapa village. He told InfoAmazonia that Nemus was not transparent and did not explain how the NFT project was supposed to work. He said,

“They never really explained the project, they just told us they’d help us.

“I made a list of things we needed — machetes, sharpeners — and I said we needed improvements at the local school, internet . . . but not so that we’d be bossed around by them.”

The land is “under litigation”

Here’s how Nemus promoted its NFT sale back in March 2022:

The Genesis NFT Drop, scheduled to be held in Q1 of 2022, will feature ~10,000 randomly generated NFTs tied to actual parcels of land in the Seruini Region of the rainforest.

In May 2023, Nemus admitted that “The property Nemus used for the Genesis Drop is currently under litigation.”

Nemus puts the blame on the “current owners” and states that, “We will not allow this to deter us from completing our mission, or to keep us in a state of inaction any longer.”

Nevertheless Nemus states, “The Genesis Drop is going to be placed on hold temporarily and will resume with a new property in the Pauini region.”

The company now claims that,

Nemus has been busy at work over the past months developing a relationship with other communities. During this silence, we have been pursuing alternatives in the Pauini region to resume the Genesis Drop.

InfoAmazonia notes that the information about the suspension of the Genesis Drop is available on Nemus’s Medium blog, but not on the company’s website. Nowhere is there any mention about what will happen to the NFTs that have already been bought.

One of the selling points of the Nemus NFTs was that they are linked to an actual area of forest. Now it appears that Nemus can simply switch the area of forest, thus eradicating the infinitesimally small amount of sense the project ever made.

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