Error limits

The need for a code of conduct for the Federal Court (STF) has never been clearer than today. Beneficial coincidence, the presidency of the Supreme Court is exercised at this delicate moment by Minister Edson Fachin, who has defended such a code for years. It is no coincidence that the Supreme Courts of countries like the United States and Germany have created their Code of Conduct in recent years, because it is becoming evident that ministers, without anyone controlling them, get lost in reprehensible personal attitudes. Minister Alexandre de Moraes’s wife’s million dollar contract with Banco Master is an example, but there are countless ministers in the higher courts whose children, wives and relatives are circumventing conflicts of interest supported by a change in legislation made by the ministers themselves.

If citizens lose confidence in the ministers of the Supreme Court, democracy will be in trouble. Credibility had already been damaged in the case of Operation Lava-Jato, because the ministers of the Supreme Court did not limit themselves to blocking the illegalities that they had reported in the relationship between the then judge Moro and the prosecutors of Curitiba. They canceled all trials, released all defendants, even those who confessed, and began returning money to those who admitted to stealing.

In addition to Dean Gilmar Mendes, who boasts of being responsible for the end of Lava-Jato, Minister Dias Toffoli has dedicated himself in recent times to the cancellation of Lava-Jato’s processes. But this is not limited to this case. He has made controversial decisions in the case of Banco Master, so numerous and so questionable that they attract attention. From the moment he resumed the process under the pretext that a person enjoying privileged jurisdiction had appeared in the investigations, to the confrontation between the representative of the Central Bank and the former banker Daniel Vorcaro, everything was contested, not only by politicians or journalists, but above all by legal experts.

A document on the commercial relations of federal deputy João Carlos Bacelar with Vorcaro, in a personal capacity, was Toffoli’s justification for seizing the STF, a few days after traveling by private jet in the company of a lawyer from Banco Master to attend the Libertadores final in Lima. Reprehensible behavior, hitchhiking has become a habit among magistrates and has accumulated irregularities.

The declaration of secrecy at the highest level was the next measure which paralyzed the investigations. Surprisingly, Toffoli provoked a confrontation during the Congress recess to oppose the versions between the investigators and the person under investigation, in an attitude that was considered by the Attorney General of the Republic himself, Paulo Gonet, as hasty, because the official statements had not yet been collected. Where would be the contradictions that could be dissipated by confrontation?

The strangeness of Minister Dias Toffoli’s decisions has raised fears that an extreme measure is being considered behind the scenes to qualify the liquidation of Banco Master as illegal. The president of the Central Bank himself, Gabriel Galípolo, had made a statement, which seemed to many improvised, on the investigation, saying that he would respond to any call to explain the details and the technical reasons for the liquidation. Why didn’t Minister Toffoli directly ask Galípolo for these explanations?