The president of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF), Justice Edson Fachin, is weighing a request from Justice Flávio Dino to add to the review of Justice André Mendonça's conduct a meeting between Mendonça and the banker Daniel Vorcaro, who controls Banco Master, along with a São Paulo cemetery case. The session on Mendonça is scheduled for September 23. According to the newspaper O Globo, Dino sent the material to Fachin on Tuesday (15), shortly before the full bench opened its session on the case of Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the heart of a court crisis set off by a Federal Police report on messages between Vorcaro and a contact attributed to Moraes.
The review of Mendonça follows accusations of abuse of authority by Moraes, who sent the court's presidency a Federal Police intelligence report questioning how Mendonça ran the Master and INSS inquiries as rapporteur. In the ruling now sent to Fachin, Dino pointed to a "sufficiently relevant set of indicia" and argued that whether the connections between Mendonça and Vorcaro exist must be clarified "by the competent authorities". The order was signed in ADPF 1.196, a case filed by the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) over funeral, cemetery and cremation services in the city of São Paulo, which Dino reports on.
A meeting on the eve of the suspension
The ruling lays out a timeline. In late 2024, Dino granted an injunction restoring caps on the prices charged by the concessionaires. The case reached the court's virtual plenary on March 14, 2025. That same day, Mendonça received Vorcaro at the São Paulo headquarters of the Instituto Iter, an organization Mendonça founded. The next day, he asked for the case to be pulled for review, a pedido de vista. When the vote resumed in April, he broke with the rapporteur and voted against the price caps. In Dino's words, the vote came "in line with the plea of the private cemeteries". Dino also wrote that at the time there were "major interests of funds managed by Banco Master precisely on matters related to the privatization of cemeteries".
O Globo reports that São Paulo state prosecutors are examining possible illegalities in the cemetery concession, and that an investigation points to Fabiano Zettel, Vorcaro's brother-in-law, as a member of the board of Cortel, the company that runs the city's funeral services, who used a bank email address in corporate documents. Mendonça confirmed the meeting in an interview published on September 2, cited in the ruling, and said he received Vorcaro at the request of members of the Lagoinha Baptist Church, with Congressman Cezinha Madureira as intermediary. Contacted about Dino's request, he did not respond, but said in a note that "his conduct, public and private, is guided by legality and impartiality".
Dino also cited the minister's brother, Alexandre de Almeida Mendonça, who worked in the leadership of SP Regula, the city agency that regulates funeral services, from July 2024 to May 2026 and was reportedly promoted to executive secretary. In a note, the agency denied any promotion, described a move between positions "at the same hierarchical level" and said he "always performed administrative management duties, with no direct responsibility for the management of the concession contracts". The order also mentions no-bid contracts signed by the Iter institute: 380,000 reais with the São Paulo city government in September 2025, and about 1.6 million reais with the state-linked Fundação para o Desenvolvimento da Educação. The institute says the contracts have no connection to the cemetery concession and that the contract with the foundation was never executed. Mendonça left his stake in Iter in early September, with "no financial consideration", according to his office. Dino added explicit caveats: he wrote that the facts do not mean there was outside interference in his colleague's rulings. "I emphasize that it is not for me, at this moment and in this forum, to anticipate a judgment of criminal liability or administrative improbity", he wrote.
The September 23 session at risk
As Fachin weighs the request, the odds of a postponement grow. Folha de S.Paulo reports that the STF president tends to delay the review, with a decision due in the coming days, and that his inner circle believes Dino's pedido de vista, which suspended Tuesday's session on Moraes, made it technically unfeasible to bring the Mendonça case to the plenary next week. When the session broke, the tally stood at 4 to 3 for keeping the two cases separate; Dino, who had voted to join them, was the one who asked for the review. He has up to 90 days, a deadline that falls on December 15, and with the court in recess from December 20 to February 1, BBC News Brasil reports the judgment may only resume in 2027. According to g1, ministers aligned with Mendonça favor a postponement, and court insiders do not rule out using Tuesday's impasse to reschedule. For now, the session stays on the calendar. If it goes ahead and the debate advances, O Globo notes, Mendonça could formally become a target of suspicion while the Moraes case remains suspended. The next step is Fachin's: keep or postpone the September 23 session.