Brazil is Latin America's largest economy and a primary destination for energy, agribusiness, infrastructure, and technology investment. Its scale and resource base draw significant inbound capital, but the regulatory, tax, and foreign-exchange environment is complex and rewards careful local structuring over improvisation.
International investors usually arrive through a two-tier structure, with a holding platform in a treaty or hub jurisdiction sitting above a Brazilian operating entity. That separation lets the cross-border layer manage financing, exit, and treaty positioning while the Brazilian company carries the licenses, contracts, and workforce on the ground. Getting the registration sequence right at the outset, meaning foreign-direct-investment registration with the Banco Central, CNPJ enrollment, and the appointment of resident representatives, determines whether capital can later be repatriated and dividends remitted cleanly.
Brazil is a civil-law jurisdiction built on the Brazilian Civil Code, with the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) at the apex of the judiciary. That tradition shapes everything from how entities are formed before a commercial registry to how succession is governed by forced-heirship rules, and it is why a credible Brazil strategy is built with Brazilian-admitted counsel rather than assumed from common-law habits. Hart David Carson does not maintain an office in Brazil; we act as coordinating counsel, structuring the international layer and managing the matter from start to finish while local-law work is performed by advogados engaged through our network.