Justice André Mendonça of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) on Tuesday ordered the release of targets of Operation Sem Desconto, the Federal Police investigation into improper deductions from pensions paid by the INSS, Brazil's national social security institute. There were six decisions in all, which revoked arrests, replaced jail with electronic ankle monitors and eased restrictions on suspects, according to news outlet G1 and newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.
The most symbolic decision covered the INSS's former attorney general, Virgílio Antônio Ribeiro de Oliveira Filho, held in pretrial detention since November 2025. He will now wear an ankle monitor and is barred from contacting other suspects and witnesses, from entering association offices and INSS or Dataprev facilities, and from leaving the country. Federal Police investigators say he received 11.9 million reais through companies and bank accounts in his wife's name, from firms tied to the associations under investigation.
An advanced stage of the probe
In the ruling, Mendonça wrote that detention is no longer justified at this stage of the investigation. The investigative phase relevant to assessing Virgílio's personal situation has "advanced significantly," he said. Elsewhere, he wrote that "the remaining risks can be adequately addressed by measures less burdensome than pretrial detention".
"In these conditions, VIRGÍLIO will not be in a position, at the current stage of the investigation, to objectively resume the illicit activities attributed to him, since he will simultaneously be barred from contact with the other suspects and witnesses, kept away from the institutional environments related to the scheme, prohibited from leaving the country and subject to the permanent surveillance of electronic monitoring," the justice wrote.
According to Folha, Mendonça downgraded each measure by one level, on the understanding that those involved have already left their posts and the evidence in the case has been collected.
Other decisions reached central figures of the scheme. The prison order for Thaisa Hoffmann Jonasso, Virgílio's wife, who was under house arrest because she has a daughter under 12, was revoked. Conafer accountant Samuel Chrisóstomo do Bomfim Júnior, described by police as the scheme's financial operator, had pretrial detention replaced with an ankle monitor. A survey by the CGU, the federal audit office, found that Conafer, the association that received the second-largest amount of pension deductions, collected about 484 million reais between 2019 and 2024. Mendonça also ordered the removal of ankle monitors from former Social Security minister José Carlos Oliveira, of the Bolsonaro government, who now goes by Ahmed Mohamad Oliveira, as well as from Pedro Corrêa Neto, a former agriculture secretary, and lawyer Gilmar Stelo.
A disputed case assignment
The decisions came amid backstage discussions by court President Luiz Edson Fachin to rethink the assignment of the INSS and Banco Master cases and contain the crisis between Mendonça and fellow Justice Alexandre de Moraes, Folha reported.
Mendonça's office expects to review the situations of other targets of the investigation. The debate over whether Fachin will strip him of the case remains open at the court.