The Banco de Brasília (BRB), the bank controlled by the government of Brazil's capital district, placed five employees on preventive leave on Monday (Sept. 14) over internal investigations tied to the Banco Master scandal. According to the newspaper Correio Braziliense, which spoke with sources inside the bank, the group includes a former finance director, a former risk-control director and three superintendents. The suspensions took place about three weeks ago and were only made public now.
The bank's internal affairs office, the corregedoria, ordered the move with the backing of the board of directors. Names and titles were not officially disclosed. In a statement, BRB said the suspensions are precautionary and do not prejudge the outcome of the investigations. In August, shareholders authorized the bank to sue former managers held responsible for losses; it has 90 days from that approval to define the list of targets.
According to Brazil's Federal Police, the fraudulent management of former BRB executives in dealings with Banco Master, the bank controlled by businessman Daniel Vorcaro, involved portfolios worth 17.5 billion reais. The experts' report named six former members of the executive board in the approvals, including former chief executive Paulo Henrique Bezerra Rodrigues Costa. The report says the bank had "relevant prudential, financial and reputational signals about Banco Master", formally incorporated into its information environment, "but did not demonstrate their consideration in the decision-making process". Master was liquidated by Brazil's central bank, and the Federal District government is trying to recover part of the money to cover the hole left at BRB, according to G1.
How the "assembly line" of documents worked
The police forensic report describes a digital paper factory. It worked like an industrial assembly line applied to paperwork: real client data, pulled from internal systems with SQL queries and organized in Excel, became the raw material; Word's mail-merge filled out 2,700 powers of attorney in a single batch; software written in C# pulled signature pages apart, the loan contracts were digitally signed in groups, and everything was assembled into PDFs that looked like legitimate operations. The data came from real products, such as CredCesta, a payroll-deduction credit line for civil servants, retirees and pensioners. The front was Tirreno Consultoria, a shell company created with 100 reais in capital, no offices and no employees, used to formalize 7.15 billion reais in fictitious credit assignments that Master sold to BRB.
The traces bothered the team. A consent form dated February 24, 2023 had its date stripped out in July 2025, according to the report. The evidence came from a 30-slide internal presentation seized in Master's technology department, which documented document production between June 18 and October 24, 2025. In internal chats, the technicians themselves doubted the data; "this list is full of holes", wrote Rafael Manfrin da Silva, from the technology area, about the selected taxpayer IDs, according to G1. Even with the edits, digital forensics found mismatches between the dates on the documents and on the signatures. It is the paper version of erasing the timestamp from an old photo without noticing that the file still stores when it was edited.
What we still do not know
We do not know whether the five suspended employees overlap with the former directors named in the police report, since the bank keeps the names confidential, and suspension by itself establishes no guilt. How much the Federal District can recover is also open. The incentives explain the choreography: BRB, controlled by the local government, needs to show internal discipline and recover money in court; those cited have every reason to dispute their link to the decisions. Two dates are worth watching: the end of the 90-day window for the bank to decide whom to sue, and any court decision that reveals the names. For anyone who works with systems, the practical lesson is blunt: the fraud fell apart precisely on the metadata the PDF editing tried to erase.