R$ 1.87 billion. That is how much 18 Brazilian public sector pension funds put into Banco Master's letters, money meant to pay future retirements and pensions. Documents from the Federal Police made public on Thursday show that the bank's owner, Daniel Vorcaro, kept a WhatsApp group with the two heads of the central bank department in charge of supervising his institution, and asked one of them for help against a rule change that threatened those sales.
The group, named "Master", was created on October 2, 2025 by Belline Santana, then head of Desup, the central bank's Department of Banking Supervision, the unit that inspects banks across the country. "Good afternoon. I created this group to make our dialogue easier," Santana wrote, according to a screenshot reproduced in the police filing. The third member was Paulo Sérgio Neves de Souza, Desup's deputy head at the time and a former director of oversight at the central bank.
Investigators concluded that the two officials, who have since left their posts, at times behaved as "employees" of the banker and received benefits in return. The filing, signed on February 27, 2026, draws on messages taken from Vorcaro's phone and on central bank records. The files came out after Justice André Mendonça of the Supreme Federal Court, Brazil's top court, lifted secrecy on proceedings tied to Banco Master; Folha reports the decision followed a request from the court's president, Edson Fachin.
Drafts reviewed by the regulators themselves
On October 27, 2025, Vorcaro sent the group a draft letter addressed to Desup itself, the department his contacts ran. "Here is a draft for your assessment," he wrote; after a voice call from Santana, he sent a new version with the request "Please check whether it works," as reported by BBC News Brasil.
On April 25, 2025, Souza reviewed Master's reply to a central bank summons. Among his suggestions, swapping "revenue raising" for "fund raising" and fixing a date. At the end, he wrote: "Important to file quickly."
According to CNN Brasil, on October 13, 2025 Vorcaro floated in the group the idea that Desup could remove restrictions on BRB, the bank controlled by the government of the federal district of Brasília, buying payroll loan portfolios. Souza called the decision difficult because the matter belonged to the central bank's legal office, but he suggested a letter stating that all of the portfolios were already in BRB's hands.
The police also found that Souza sent talking points for Vorcaro to raise in meetings with the central bank's leadership, and warned him before a February 2024 meeting with then oversight director Ailton Aquino that he could be questioned about his ties to asset manager Reag and its founder, João Carlos Mansur.
Explainer: letras financeiras, or bank letters, are debt securities banks issue to raise money, without the protection of the FGC deposit insurance fund, which repays up to R$ 250,000 per customer when a bank fails. Public sector pension funds bought them because they were supposed to generate returns to pay future pensions.
A request against a pension rule
On May 24, 2024, Vorcaro asked Souza for "help from the central bank on an issue," according to Folha. He said large banks were lobbying Previc, the regulator of private pension funds, to drop institutions rated S3, the tier of small banks with assets between 0.1% and 1% of GDP, from a list of eligible institutional investments. Master was an S3 bank: it held 0.57% of the financial system's total assets, less than 1% of the money handled by the country's banks.
In Vorcaro's view, the change, combined with a new FGC rule, would hurt his business. Folha found that state and municipal pension regimes had concentrated up to 20% of their assets in Master securities without FGC coverage, with 18 funds investing R$ 1.87 billion. The largest single amount came from Rioprevidência, the Rio de Janeiro state employees' fund: R$ 970 million, more than half the total, followed by Amprev, of Amapá state, with R$ 400 million.
Master was in trouble when, on March 28, 2025, BRB announced a deal to buy 58% of the bank's capital. According to the police, BRB poured about R$ 12 billion into payroll loan portfolios of "highly dubious" origin that proved to be "nonexistent or in default", more than six times what the pension funds had invested.
The findings are part of a Federal Police submission to the Supreme Court and have not yet been judged. Folha says it contacted the lawyers of the two former central bank officials and received no reply by publication time.