Nearly 44 percent of what Brazil’s National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES) finances is completely hidden. And more than half of what BNDES sends overseas is secret. This is how the bank deals with transparency, even though the money is public and comes from, for example, the Brazilian Treasury and the Ministry of Labor and Employment’s Worker’s Support Fund.
In 2012, BNDES loaned 156 billion Brazilian reais (64 billion US dollars) of this public money. It was in the search for what happened to this money over the course of three months that our team discovered the scope of investments in infrastructure in the Amazon where these public works are causing glaring social and environmental impacts. See the primary discoveries in this animation (English translation of the subtitles is available below the video):
