Two court officials were at Banco Master, in São Paulo, looking for the institution’s liquidator, Eduardo Félix Bianchini, before the Christmas holidays, fueling hopes that he will be summoned to provide clarification in the coming days.
A retired employee of the Central Bank and chosen by the regulator to handle the liquidation of Daniel Vorcaro’s bank, Bianchini spent Christmas with his family outside São Paulo and was not in the office during the agents’ visit.
Bianchini has become the target of Vorcaro’s defense, which is trying, with the STF (Federal Supreme Court) and the TCU (Federal Court of Auditors), to obtain the annulment of the settlement.
Thanks to access to Master data, the work of the liquidator will show, once completed, all contracts and payments made by the bank to service providers, including lawyers who worked in the defense of the institution.
Master hired the office of members of the family of Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the STF (Supreme Federal Court), for 3.6 million reais per month, to help defend the interests of the institution, according to the newspaper O Globo.
The risk that Bianchini would be called upon to clarify the legal imbroglio surrounding the liquidation came on the radar after Master’s defense accused the BC of using the liquidator to obtain information from the liquidated bank.
The information is contained in a petition sent to Minister Jhonatan de Jesus, of the TCU, as shown in a report published on the Metropoles portal.
Minister Dias Toffoli, of the STF, decided to organize a confrontation between Vorcaro and Paulo Henrique Costa, former president of the BRB (Bank of Brasilia), in the presence of the supervisory director of the BC, Ailton de Aquino Santos. The showdown is scheduled for December 30.
Contacted, Toffoli denied through his advisor having sent court officials to summon the Master’s liquidator. The minister informed that at present, only the three names already revealed by the STF for the clash are being retained.
Minister Jhonatan de Jesus also pushed for an action that restricted the work of technicians from Audbancos (Specialized Audit in Public Banks and Financial Regulators), a unit of the TCU responsible for inspecting Brazil’s public banks and financial institutions, according to information from two judicial employees interviewed by the report.
Jesus ordered the BC to denounce the supposed signs of haste in the liquidation of the Master. The TCU press office could not be reached this Sunday (28) and did not respond to an emailed request for comment. The court placed secret the process of analyzing a possible omission of the BC in Master’s operations.
THE Leaf He heard an old-school technician from British Columbia, now retired, with extensive experience in bank liquidations, tell him about the Master case. According to him, any interference by the STF and the Court of Auditors in the work of the liquidator would constitute an unprecedented act. The former civil servant, who worked on the most noisy bank bankruptcy cases, sees behind these movements an attempt to intimidate the Master’s liquidation work.
Former BC director Luiz Fernando Figueiredo believes that TCU and STF have no idea what they are doing in this move involving the Master. “I had never seen it. What we are asking are things that make no sense,” he said. According to him, British Columbia has all the legal powers to proceed with the settlement.
For him, the fraud at the Vorcaro bank was so enormous that it could not be disputed. “It was a gigantic fraud. It was not the decision of a director, but of an entire jury based on a very solid volume of documentation.”
Searched by Leaflawyer Walfrido Warde, who is working for Vorcaro’s defense, responded that he was outside Brazil and that aides would contact him to answer questions. Until the publication of this report, no response from lawyers had been received to the request for information.
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