The Supreme Federal Court (STF) of Brazil has decided this Tuesday to provisionally suspend the Director General of the Federal Police, Andrei Rodrigues, and the head of Intelligence of the body, Leandro Almada da Costa, for preparing at least six confidential reports about one of its judges.
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The measure, adopted by Supreme Court judge André Mendonça, responds to an investigation opened for alleged illicit and irregular surveillance. According to the decision, the reports collected and monitored the actions and decisions of judge Mendonça himself and the State Attorney General, Jorge Messias.
Mendonça explained that the documents lacked official letterhead, signature, or numbering. In addition to temporarily removing Rodrigues and Da Costa, the judge also ordered the opening of disciplinary and criminal files in the Federal Police Internal Affairs and prohibited the preparation of this type of report on members of the judiciary and the State Attorney’s Office.
The Vorcaro case, whose key figure is the former president of the now-dissolved Banco Master, Daniel Vorcaro – investigated for alleged fraud and document falsification – is the central trigger of the crisis. The instruction is in the hands of judge Mendonça.
During the investigation, messages were found on Vorcaro’s phone in which the former owner of Banco Master asked for protection from judge Alexandre de Moraes and also mentioned “Andrei,” identified by the Federal Police itself as Rodrigues, asking to stop the investigations against him.
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The exchanges came to light after the lifting of the secrecy of the case file by judge Mendonça. The situation worsened when judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered the incorporation into the judicial file of six “Intelligence reports” secretly prepared by the Federal Police throughout August.
In these documents, police Intelligence speculated about the coordinated actions of Mendonça and Messias in the investigations linked to Vorcaro, supporting the hypothesis that the Attorney General avoided appealing the magistrate’s decisions to preserve the relationship between them, which they attributed to a “common religious matrix,” an argument the police used to justify the targeted collection of information about the case instructor.
Vorcaro is under investigation for his role as president of Banco Master, already liquidated due to a fraudulent scheme that has left a financial hole of 12 billion reais (1.696 billion euros) and 1.6 million affected.
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