Congress maintains R$1 billion in amendments with a hidden sponsor – 16/12/2025 – Power

Targets of a Federal Police operation on Friday (12), the parliamentary amendments to the Budget continue with a system that is not transparent and keeps the sponsors of more than a billion reais of funds hidden, even after the STF (Supreme Federal Court) blocked the payment of resources and demanded that the Legislature adopt new rules.

A few months after the agreement which released the payment of funds, the model adopted proved to be inconsistent: consultation of the Leaf based on the year 2025, shows that the data is distributed in more than 40 files on the websites of the House and Senate committees, with formatting errors, links that make consultation difficult and formats that do not allow working on the data.

Transparency portals prevent anyone from knowing who indicated the expense paid, since the authorship of government portals is that of the commission itself; and almost 10% of funds do not even identify the author, maintaining the use of so-called leadership amendments – a device by which party leaders collect requests from their seats, but sign off on the allocation of the resource, thus hiding their true sponsor.

In May this year, the Minister of the Supreme Court, Flávio Dino, decided that this mechanism could only be used to direct the resources of the parliamentarian who occupies the position, and could not be used to hide who had actually indicated the funds.

Congress also created an electronic system (Sinec) to record amendments and send them to committees and, later, to the government, but access is exclusive to Parliament. Disclosure is done individually on the committee pages, which do not always consolidate the data.

Some applications, for example, ended up being rejected due to recording errors (incorrect city name or CNPJ for example) and were resubmitted, without this having been identified in the report. This way the numbers may appear doubled. As the same amendment contains a large number of indications, it is practically impossible to know which parliamentarian ultimately benefited from the payment.

Last Friday (12), the PF carried out an operation against the diversion of resources from parliamentary amendments to addresses linked to Mariângela Fialek, known as Tuca, an advisor who coordinated the distribution of funds during the administration of former Speaker of the House Arthur Lira (PP-AL) and continued to exercise this role under the presidency of Hugo Motta (Republicanos-PB).

For Dino, who authorized the PF operation, “there are elements which indicate that, despite the change of command in the Chamber of Deputies, the party investigated would still retain an important role in the already known attempts to perpetuate the unfortunate secret budget”. The search and seizure took place in one of the presidential offices, where the server usually travels.

Tuca said, through lawyers, that he was serving a “technical, nonpartisan and impersonal” role and that all documents seized were public. Motta and Lira came to the aide’s defense, arguing that she was a House employee and that there was no impropriety in the meaning of the amendments.

At the end of 2024, Dino blocked 4.2 billion reais in commission changes, due to a lack of transparency. These resources replaced the rapporteur’s old amendments, known for keeping secret the distribution of billions of public money to the electoral bases of deputies and senators, with political and confidential transfer criteria. The part is examined for deviations and irregularities.

Congress negotiated a deal with the Supreme Court to release payment for the committee’s amendments and approve a bill ensuring that the name of the parliamentarian who provided the resources would be made public. The proposal, however, allowed parliamentarians to circumvent Dino’s determination, by designating the party leader as the author.

Survey carried out by Leaf in the minutes of the commissions it was identified that at least 1 billion reais remained hidden under the name of the party leadership. The PP leadership of the Chamber, for example, distributed around 358 million reais in this way – it is the party that has used this method the most.

Most of the resources went to Piauí (state of the party president, Senator Ciro Nogueira), with 189 million reais. Next comes Rio de Janeiro, electoral base of the party leader in the House, with R$80 million, in addition to Tocantins and Alagoas (home of former President Arthur Lira), with R$19 million each.

Leader of the PP in the House, deputy dr. Luizinho Texeira (RJ) said Leaf that “all amendments have their MPs responsible”, and that perhaps the system has incorrectly linked resources that would go to other MPs as being drafted by management.

Other acronyms that indicated the most resources under the nickname “leader’s amendment” were União Brasil, with R$266 million going to 15 states, and the Republicans, with R$201 million. Hugo Motta, according to the spreadsheets, reported R$180 million in his name, but another R$77 million was directed to Paraíba under the name of the Republican leader, whose acronym is the main name of the state.

Also included in the spreadsheets are those responsible for the amendments of “party leader” Solidariedade, Avante, Podemos and PL, the party of former President Jair Bolsonaro and which opposes the Lula (PT) government.

Another problem concerns the data itself. The documents that appear on the House and Senate amendment pages contain unstandardized and uncompiled information with incorrect links, and even with the use of artificial intelligence, the Leaf was not able to systematize the information to ensure its comparability.

In most commissions, the data is in the form of PDF files, which makes reading difficult. Few make consolidated files available in an editable format, such as Excel, that would allow them to be analyzed.

Furthermore, some of the files contain information that is already obsolete, according to technicians close to the file.

The government has made changes to the Transparency Portal, among other channels for disseminating information on federal spending, but it is still not possible to locate the author of part of the parliamentary amendments.

There are approximately BRL 50.4 billion in parliamentary amendments available in the 2025 budget, of which BRL 39.1 billion has been committed and approximately BRL 27.4 billion has been paid.

When contacted, the Union Comptroller General (UCG) said it would make authorship information available until 2024. “The completion of the work plan will take place soon and will enable the integration of the transparency portal (with) data on support and requests for changes from the Commission for the financial year 2025 and subsequent years,” the ministry said.