Digimais, the bank controlled by Grupo Record, the media company owned by bishop Edir Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, bought R$ 271.4 million in old securities of the defunct Banco do Estado de Santa Catarina (Besc) through an investment fund called Betel, Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday (18). The papers, known as cártulas, are worth almost nothing in the market, and are the same kind Banco Master used in the balance sheet scheme at the center of the Master case. The data come from the CVM, Brazil's securities regulator, and were submitted to the Senate's inquiry on organized crime.
Until January, Digimais was the fund's only shareholder, and its entire R$ 271.4 million portfolio was in Besc papers, according to CVM data obtained by Folha. That equals 82% of the bank's equity, which stood at R$ 331 million in its latest balance sheet. The fund was created on April 24, 2025 under the name PNG International Bank and became Betel on June 26 that year, when Digimais bought the entire share issue. The Besc papers show up in the fund's reports from July 2025 through the most recent filing, from August this year.
The paper trail
The cártulas were bought from two other funds, SDG II and BB Claim, Folha reports. Both belong to a chain whose ultimate owners are sons of João Carlos Mansur, who controlled the asset manager Reag. Reag ran the funds of both Master and Digimais and was liquidated by Brazil's Central Bank in January over alleged violations of financial system rules. In the Master case, SDG II was used to hide R$ 5.4 billion in bank loans, and funds linked to the bank bought Besc titles as if they were worth millions, to inflate assets, back large withdrawals and support fundraising through CDBs, a Brazilian bank bond similar to a certificate of deposit. The CVM has investigated Reag's operations with Besc papers since 2022. Reag did not respond to a request for comment. Mansur has offered a plea deal to the federal prosecutors' office and was awaiting approval from Justice André Mendonça, who oversees the Master case at the Supreme Court, until the court's crisis froze the inquiries.
Contacted by Folha, Digimais said Betel has not been part of its portfolio since October 2025. Folha says that answer contradicts the CVM data sent to the Senate inquiry. The fund is not mentioned in the bank's balance sheet and does not appear in its prudential conglomerate registered with the Central Bank. The bank declined to say how much it received for the fund shares, if they were sold. Betel means "house of God" in Hebrew and is the name of a biblical city that Jacob is said to have founded after a prophetic dream.
Investigation and results
The Federal Police is investigating Digimais for allegedly manipulating its financial reports to hide its real condition and look solid before regulators. The suspected crimes include fraudulent management, false data in reports and loans that Brazilian law bars banks from making, with a focus on the purchase of precatórios, court-ordered debts owed by the state. According to Folha, investigators had already found Master-like methods to inflate the bank's assets, but the use of Besc cártulas had not surfaced before. On Thursday (17), the bank reported a loss of R$ 581.4 million for the first half of the year, a figure also reported by Valor Econômico and larger than its R$ 331 million equity.
Estadão reported in May that the bank used funds it itself held to strip delinquent loan portfolios from its books. With those moves it declared a R$ 31 million profit at the end of 2025 and left out at least R$ 480 million in overdue credits, and it sold precatórios to Macedo's own holding company, the paper found. About R$ 3 billion sat in funds auditors could not examine, according to Estadão. For savers who buy CDBs from mid-sized banks, the case shows that off-balance-sheet funds can hold papers with no market value, and that the size of a bank's books determines how much it can raise. For customers of auto loans, the bank's largest business, and payroll lending, Digimais remains up for sale after more than a year, under Federal Police investigation and with a half-year loss larger than its own equity.