Brasília, Thursday night. Justice André Mendonça of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) lifted the secrecy on a Federal Police expert report on the Banco Master case. Among the pages released is the finding that former executives of BRB, the bank controlled by the government of the Federal District, the region that holds the capital, engaged in fraudulent management in the purchase of credit portfolios from Banco Master worth R$ 17.5 billion, a lender liquidated by Brazil's central bank.
According to G1, the news portal of Globo, which reported the document, the Federal Police examined operations totaling R$ 47.8 billion but based its fraud conclusion on 25 portfolio acquisitions approved by BRB's collegiate board. The experts say the bank had "relevant prudential, financial and reputational signs about Banco Master, formally incorporated into its informational environment, but did not demonstrate their consideration in the decision-making process".
"The record therefore allows the characterization, from a forensic and technical perspective, of the practice of fraudulent management in the acquisition of Banco Master portfolios, materialized by the manipulation of the sequence of governance, the retrospective formalization of controls, the material circumvention of the authority limits regime and the objective continuity of operations despite prudential alerts and concretely identified weaknesses," the report says.
Payments before the analysis
The examination reconstructed how the purchases were run. Of the 84 acquisitions of retail credit portfolios reviewed, worth R$ 17.58 billion, in 22 operations totaling R$ 7.63 billion (43.41% of the money disbursed), at least one of the mandatory technical reviews was finished only after payment. The expected order was the opposite: the teams in charge of risk, pricing and documents were supposed to vet the portfolios before the money moved. The experts also found that the operations were kept successively under the R$ 750 million ceiling to escape aggregate review by the board of directors, and that BRB concentrated a large share of its exposure in a single counterparty, Master, raising the bank's institutional risk.
The warning signs circulated before the purchases scaled up. In October 2023, Fitch Ratings upgraded Master's grade but flagged volatile results, a complex business model and exposure to low-liquidity assets. On July 17, 2024, BRB's board authorized spending of up to R$ 750 million on portfolios, the decision that opened the sequence of acquisitions. Internal opinions from September and December of that year recorded Master's assets up 83.5% in 12 months, at R$ 50.9 billion; the loan book up 81.6%, at R$ 21 billion; loan-loss reserves up 82.9%; a Basel index rated "very low"; and cash below 10% of deposits. A November 2024 report by RISKBank/Eleven put Master's credit at 7.4 times its equity. On that body of information, the experts wrote: "The answer is affirmative as to the existence and circulation of risk information, but negative as to its adequate conversion into diligence and effective conditioning of the operations". A working group created by BRB itself identified weaknesses in collateral, documentation, lien registrations, transfers and the origination chain of the credits, and the board kept the strategy even after those reports.
Former executives named in the report
The Federal Police linked six former members of the collegiate board to the approvals: president Paulo Henrique Bezerra Rodrigues Costa; Executive Director of People Management Cristiane Maria Lima Bukowitz; Executive Director of Finance and Controllership Dario Oswaldo Garcia Junior; Executive Director of Control and Risks Luana de Andrade Ribeiro; Executive Director of Wholesale and Government Diogo Ilário de Araújo Oliveira; and Executive Director of Technology José Maria Correa Dias Junior. According to the experts, the directors present at the meetings were documentarily bound to decisions approved unanimously, in deliberations on the continuity of operations, new acquisitions, the easing of risk alerts and the later completion of documents. The legal director, Jacques Mauricio Ferreira Veloso de Melo, was not linked because the minutes show he had no vote or was absent.
The report is a technical piece in investigations running at the STF under Mendonça, who oversees the main inquiries tied to Master, and it is not a conviction. The BRB crisis has already entered the race for the Senate seat of the Federal District, with candidates pressed to take a position, G1 reports. In the same city where photographers recorded the BRB facade on November 18, 2025, the day the Master crisis became public, Thursday night's release handed readers what the Federal Police says it found behind the purchases: payments that came before the analysis, controls formalized after the fact, and internal alerts that never changed the course of the decisions.