The businessman João Carlos Mansur, founder and former owner of the asset manager Reag, has signed a plea deal with Brazil's federal prosecutors (PGR) in which he says investment funds run by the firm were used to hide bribe payments from Daniel Vorcaro, the owner of Banco Master, to public officials. According to Folha de S.Paulo, the agreement was sent last week to Supreme Court Justice André Mendonça, who oversees the Master case at the STF, and awaits his approval.
People familiar with the agreement told Folha that Mansur describes how the asset manager and its funds were used in the scheme under investigation, and identifies people who acted as front men for Vorcaro. Federal Police officers joined the early negotiations but did not pursue them. According to the news site O Brasilianista, the proposal delivered to the PGR in late August, with 17 annexes, traces the path of the money: funds left Banco Master for companies, which sent part of the money to Reag funds, using front men and offshore structures to hide where the money came from and where it ended up.
How the case got here
Since last year, investigators have been examining suspected financial fraud involving Vorcaro and Reag in the so-called Master case, and Mansur's deal is the first plea agreement signed by the PGR within Operação Compliance Zero, one strand of the inquiry. Reag appears in core transactions: police are examining a triangle between Master, Reag and the Banco de Brasília (BRB), which bought 21.9 billion reais in credit portfolios from Master, of which 12.2 billion reais are considered fraudulent by investigators, according to O Brasilianista. Reag-linked funds, including Verbier, Cabreúva, Borneo and Delta, took a 23.5 percent stake in BRB. Mansur is described as one of the architects of those transactions, and the bank's former president, Paulo Henrique Costa, is also under investigation.
Under the deal, Mansur must help locate and recover the diverted funds and pay a 40 million reais fine, a figure first reported by UOL. O Brasilianista says the amount matches what Mansur allegedly received from Reag while he ran the firm. Most of the diverted money sits abroad in offshore companies, investigators say, and the collaboration could allow those funds to return to Brazil without agreements with foreign authorities, sparing Brazil from having to share a cut of whatever is recovered, Folha reports. In such deals, a collaborator's statements must still be backed by other evidence. Vorcaro, who is under investigation, has also proposed his own cooperation, but investigators judged that his material added little new information, O Brasilianista reports.
Defenses and next steps
Vorcaro's lawyers said they had no access to the annexes of the plea deal and therefore cannot comment. Mansur's lawyers did not respond. The proposal that preceded the deal also mentioned political figures, including Senator Jaques Wagner of the Workers' Party and former Salvador mayor ACM Neto, according to O Brasilianista, which did not detail what was alleged about them. Vorcaro, Mansur and Costa are under investigation; Wagner and ACM Neto are named only in the proposal. The next step belongs to Mendonça, who must decide whether to ratify the agreement. No date has been set.