After successfully bringing the investigation into Master to the Federal Court and declaring absolute secrecy of the matter, the next stage of the bank’s defense strategy is already underway. The goal is to undermine the credibility of the Central Bank and dismantle the work that led to the liquidation of the Master in order to reverse it and, ultimately, perhaps even receive some form of compensation.
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The plan has already been designed by Master’s lawyers in statements made both to the Supreme Court itself and to the Federal Court of Accounts, during the process in which Minister Jhonatan de Jesus requested clarification from the BC on the “extreme decision” to liquidate the Vorcaro bank.
But for the ploy to work, facts must be created to justify a decision by Toffoli against the directors and technicians of BC. The minister’s record allows us to assume that he has a chance to prosper.
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Since boarding a businessman friend’s plane with the lawyer of one of the people investigated in the case to go to Lima to watch the Libertadores final, Toffoli has followed the defense script to the letter.
In recent days he has already rejected the request of the General Prosecutor’s Office and that of the BC itself to suspend the confrontation between the owner of Master, Daniel Vorcaro, the former president of the BRB, Paulo Henrique Costa, and the director of inspection of the BC, Ailton Aquino.
He also said Aquino was not under investigation.
But he placed the three on an equal footing in a procedure which, in theory, should serve to compare the versions, but which seems strange, since there is still no version, since no one has spoken yet.
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Assuming that Toffoli does indeed want to know how the Central Bank acted in this matter, it would be appropriate to try to at least understand how the decision to liquidate Master was taken.
First useful information: the liquidation was decided with the unanimous approval of the collegial council of the BC, including the yes of the president, Gabriel Galipolo, who in principle did not need to express himself, the eight other directors being in favor. Responsibility therefore falls on all municipal leaders.
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And yet: of all, the one who most resisted the idea of liquidation was Ailton Aquino himself, of the inspection service. Internally at the BC and in the financial system, Aquino was considered an ally of the Master.
Records from the Credit Guarantee Fund (CGF), backed by resources from the banks themselves, show there have been 38 formal communications about liquidity risks, holes in Master’s balance sheet and other issues that should lead to stronger action from the regulator.
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Almost all alerts were directed at the Aquino region, and many were issued during face-to-face meetings. Two people who attended these meetings told me that the manager’s attitude was always to downplay the problems – which only got worse over time.
The discussion around a more drastic attitude towards Master, such as intervening or liquidating, only began to take shape from March 2025, when BRB announced that it would buy 58% of the bank from Daniel Volrcaro but leave him the management of the institution. In practice, this was a simple rescue, as the sale would not guarantee control of the BRB.
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It was in the process of analyzing this operation that another department, the Financial System Organization and Resolution, discovered fraud in the salary credit contracts which guaranteed the transfer of 12.2 billion BRL from BRB to Master via the sale of the portfolio, even before the merger of the two banks.
From then on, an internal split occurred, with Renato Gomes’ zone proposing to intervene in Master’s zone and Aquino’s zone to try to find a solution that would allow the bank to continue operating. Therefore, the BC member who knows the fraud and its mechanism best is not Aquino, but Gomes, who has already completed his term.
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Depositions have not yet been scheduled, but there is tension among BC techs about being called to testify, for fear of facing some form of intimidation.
As we have already published, these same technicians informed the investigators of the Public Ministry and the Federal Police that they had never suffered so much political pressure in favor of a single bank as in the case of Master.
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While this internal conflict was taking place, in July 2025, a meeting took place during which the Minister of the STF, Alexandre de Moraes, asked Galipolo for the Master. Moraes, whose wife has a 130 million reais legal services contract with the bank, said he liked Vorcaro and resorted to an argument widely used at the time: that the banker was being persecuted by the big guys who didn’t want competition. When informed by Galípolo that the BC had discovered the fraud, Moraes backtracked and said everything had to be investigated.
Since then, Master has also stopped making mandatory deposits on BC cash flows determined by law, in addition to asking the FGC to open credit lines – both glaring signs of liquidity problems.
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Two days before the liquidation was declared and Vorcaro was arrested, the owner of Master asked to advance a meeting with Aquino to tell him that he had found buyers for his bank, a consortium between the financial company Fictor and an Arab fund whose identity he never found out.
After his arrest in the departure area of Guarulhos airport, the minutes of the meeting were used by Vorcaro’s defense to claim that he had informed the Central Bank that he would be traveling to Dubai and therefore could not flee. The registration letter, signed by Aquino, was key to getting Vorcaro out of prison and sent to house arrest with an electronic ankle bracelet.
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If he really wanted to understand how the work of the municipality’s technicians was done, Toffoli should have called at least the two directors – and not just the one closest to Vorcaro. Faced with this situation, the legal representatives of the BC accused the risk of “procedural traps” and requested the cancellation of the confrontation.
To those who ask, behind the scenes, the minister tries to convince that he will not improve the Master’s situation. But so far what has been observed is the opposite. It seems that Toffoli is more interested in this confrontation than in Palmeiras’ victory in Lima. His team actually lost the title to Flamengo. But that of Vorcaro only had victories.
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