Messages sent by Daniel Vorcaro, the former controlling owner of Banco Master, indicate that he used two companies to pay for a May 2024 trip to New York by Luiz Fux, a justice of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF), and for a lunch held in the justice's honor. The report was published by Folha de S.Paulo on Tuesday (22). The exchanges were found on Vorcaro's phone, seized by the Federal Police as part of an investigation into the bank. Vorcaro is under investigation and has not been convicted in the case.
According to the newspaper, between March and May 2024 Vorcaro instructed an employee to buy airfare and hotel stays for Fux and his wife, Eliane Fux, and asked that the expenses be processed through Antonio Camarotti, CEO and publisher of Forbes magazine in Brazil. In one exchange, an employee tells Vorcaro that Camarotti had confirmed the justice's attendance at one of the magazine's New York events.
"We will issue the ticket and the hotel for him and his wife. Can we proceed?" the employee wrote. "Yes, but we have to do it through Camarotti. We cannot issue it ourselves," Vorcaro replied.
In a statement sent by the Supreme Court's press office, Fux said he never exchanged messages with Vorcaro and "was never invited by him to events". The justice said he was "invited directly by Forbes" and "gave a lecture at a magazine event in May 2024 on legal security and the Brazil risk". He also said he had no contact with Vorcaro during the lunch.
The lunch was organized by Forbes and sponsored by BeFly, a travel industry company that had Vorcaro's bank as a financial partner. The seized exchanges indicate that the banker supported the magazine's events through that agency, according to Folha. In a statement, Forbes Brasil confirmed that BeFly sponsored the lunch in Fux's honor and that Master was one of the supporters of the Forbes Party in New York, held the next day, and said both were "formal, regular and transparent commercial sponsorship relationships".
Timeline
Master bought in 2023 the right to collect court-ordered federal debt payments known as precatórios, through funds managed by companies now under investigation in Operação Compliance Zero, according to G1. The Federal Police suspects the claims were issued by courts before the cases had ended, while the federal government could still appeal. Brazil's antitrust regulator, Cade, approved the sale of the bank to BRB in May 2025. Vorcaro's phone was seized by police, and one day after exchanges between him and the lawyer Rodrigo Fux, the justice's son, became public, Fux asked investigators for the device's data.
The Master case has dominated news coverage of the presidential campaign 12 days before the first round, set for October 4. No date has been disclosed for the next procedural step related to this episode.