Justice André Mendonça, the rapporteur for the Banco Master case at Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF), plans to release for a full-bench vote next week the question of messages exchanged between fellow Justice Alexandre de Moraes and banker Daniel Vorcaro. The move comes even after the Attorney General's Office (PGR), the federal prosecution service, asked that the inquiry be declared void. G1 reported the plan, citing sources at the court.
Once the case is released, court President Edson Fachin sets the date of the session. The bench of eleven justices will face two questions, as G1 summarizes them: whether Moraes, the court's vice president, should be investigated over the messages attributed to him and over meetings with Vorcaro, the former owner of Banco Master; and whether Mendonça could run this inquiry on his own, since STF justices may only be investigated with the full bench's approval.
The prosecutors' position
The PGR filed its opinion on Tuesday (Sept 1), before the five-day deadline Mendonça had set on Monday. Attorney General Paulo Gonet argues the rapporteur's investigative order is void. Gonet himself is mentioned in Vorcaro's conversations, according to the G1 blog of journalist Ana Flor.
"The order given to the police authority to investigate specific people, without a request from the prosecution and without initiative from the police, is void, because it exceeds the limits of a magistrate's competence in the pre-trial phase."
Gonet added that even if signs of wrongdoing had surfaced by chance, it would not fall to Mendonça to dig deeper into references to his colleague. Inside the court, according to G1, two readings of Mendonça's conduct circulate. One holds that he investigated no one: he merely asked the Federal Police for information on the Master inquiries and received material obtained through the chance discovery of evidence. The other, followed by the PGR, says a justice was investigated without the bench's authorization.
What the Federal Police report says
The messages were extracted from Vorcaro's phone and reported by the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo; Mendonça lifted the secrecy of the report on Tuesday. The Federal Police document points to message exchanges and meetings between Moraes and Vorcaro since 2024 and details contracts between Banco Master and the law firm of Viviane Barci de Moraes, the justice's wife, one of them valued at R$ 131 million, according to BBC News Brasil. In one conversation, Vorcaro called the contract the bank's "most important" and asked that payments never slip by a single day. An analysis of the file's metadata indicated the contract was edited by Moraes. In a statement, the Barci de Moraes firm said its compliance office had consulted the justice about possible legal impediments before the deal and that he "never judged any case involving Banco Master".
What follows is a matter of scheduling. Mendonça wants to release the case next week, according to G1, and Fachin will pick the day. In the ruling that lifted the secrecy, the rapporteur wrote that the deliberation should be public and transparent, at an in-person session of the full bench, which he called the "sovereign instance to analyze, in a technical and strictly legal manner, the new elements brought by the police authority".