Agents of Brazil's Federal Police and officials from the CGU, the federal government's audit office, fanned out early on Thursday morning (10) across 49 addresses in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Ceará and the Federal District, armed with search and seizure warrants issued by the Supreme Federal Court. The operation, named Make Up, reaches 29 people suspected of taking part in a scheme to divert public money from parliamentary amendments, budget earmarks that members of Congress can direct to projects, tied to "Dark Horse", the film about the life of former president Jair Bolsonaro starring the American actor Jim Caviezel. The number of targets was reported by columnist Mônica Bergamo of the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.
In a statement, the Federal Police said the operation investigates the suspected diversion of amendment funds transferred through a funding agreement to a civil society organization. According to the force, investigators point to a criminal organization of public and private agents suspected of steering the money to irregularly subcontracted companies, with no proof that the services hired were ever delivered. Financial records cited by the police identified transactions in the hundreds of millions of reais among companies in the scheme, and attempts to conceal the diversions reportedly continued until July of this year. The details were published by BBC News Brasil.
Among the targets are federal deputy Mario Frias of the right-wing PL party, screenwriter and executive producer of "Dark Horse", and the film's producer, Karina Ferreira da Gama. According to the news site g1, Frias's cellphone was seized during the searches, and two of the addresses targeted belong to NGOs linked to Karina, the Instituto Conhecer Brasil and the Academia Nacional de Cultura. The company that made the film, Go Up, is not among the targets of the warrants. The crimes under investigation include embezzlement, document forgery, money laundering, criminal organization and bid-rigging. TV Globo says it contacted Frias and Karina's lawyers and received no reply.
g1 found that the operation seeks to clarify the transfer of 2 million reais in public money steered by Frias to organizations linked to the film's producer. The relationship between the two predates "Dark Horse": in 2022, Karina's company, GO7 Assessoria, Produção e Marketing Cultural, was paid 54,000 reais to produce Frias's election campaign. The following year, now a congressman, Frias allocated 2.5 million reais in amendments of his own authorship to the Instituto Conhecer Brasil, for social projects in the interior of São Paulo state.
From TV heartthrob to the Supreme Court
Before politics, Frias, 54, born in Rio de Janeiro, was a heartthrob on TV Globo in the late 1990s. He starred in the sixth season of the teen soap "Malhação", in 1999, in a romantic pairing with Priscila Fantin, and appeared in novelas such as "As Filhas da Mãe", "O Beijo do Vampiro" and "Senhora do Destino". He also worked at Record and Band and hosted the show "O Último Passageiro" on RedeTV!. In June 2020 he took over the Special Secretariat of Culture in the Bolsonaro government, staying until 2022, the year he was elected federal deputy for São Paulo with 122,564 votes.
Suspicions over the film's financing gained force in May, when the website The Intercept Brasil revealed messages and an audio recording in which Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, a presidential candidate this year, demanded money from the former banker Daniel Vorcaro, owner of the defunct Banco Master and now jailed in Brasília, for the production about his father. According to findings cited by g1, Vorcaro transferred about 61 million reais to the project before his arrest, sending the money to a fund in the United States administered by a lawyer linked to Eduardo Bolsonaro. Frias denied wrongdoing, at one point saying the production had not received "a single cent" from Vorcaro, then backtracked, saying the banker and his bank were not direct investors, though there was a legal relationship with a company called Entre Investimentos. In a filing with the Supreme Court, he called the suspected diversion "absolutely false, devoid of any evidentiary support and defamatory".
Two inquiries, one film
The investigation behind Thursday's action began after a request by deputy Tabata Amaral of the PSB party. On March 21, Justice Flávio Dino gave Frias five days to respond; court officers tried three times to find him at his congressional office without success, according to a record filed on April 14. The next day, Dino opened a preliminary inquiry into amendments by PL deputies directed to NGOs linked to the producer. According to BBC News Brasil, two inquiries on "Dark Horse" now sit at the Supreme Court: Dino's, which examines the amendments and gave rise to the operation, and another, under Justice André Mendonça, which looks at the transfers Vorcaro made at Flávio Bolsonaro's request. Thursday's action is not related to that second case.
By late morning, agents were still collecting documents and equipment from the searched addresses, and the film that runs through both inquiries kept its title untouched. "Dark Horse" is the English expression for the long shot, the one who emerges against every prediction. This time, the ones trying to get ahead of the ending were the investigators, following the trail of public money that led to the producer of a presidential biopic.