Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) judge Alexandre de Moraes allegedly exchanged messages with the former president of the defunct Banco Master, Daniel Vorcaro, who is under investigation for fraud and financial irregularities. In these messages, Vorcaro reportedly asked him to intervene to stop investigations into the financial institution and to advise him on how to thwart the execution of the preventive detention order issued against him, according to a police report.
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This is reflected in a series of messages collected by the Brazilian newspaper Estadão from a Federal Police document and extracted from Vorcaro’s mobile phone, in which De Moraes and the former banker exchanged content in single-view mode, through screenshots of texts written in a notes application. As a result of this method, the investigation has only been able to access the images sent by Vorcaro, without recovering any response from the magistrate.
The first request from the former Banco Master director took place on October 30, 2025, when he told the judge that it was “important to reinforce,” with the Federal Police director, Andrei Rodrigues, and Brazil’s attorney general, Paulo Gonet, the instruction that “no one below” should do “any nonsense” with Banco Master, which at that time was about to announce a supposed sale to a consortium with investors from the United Arab Emirates.
At that time, Estadão reports, Vorcaro had already signed a contract worth 131 million Brazilian reais (almost 22 million euros) with the law firm of Moraes’ wife, Viviane Barci.
The banker’s requests to the judge continued until five hours before his arrest, on the night of November 17 at São Paulo International Airport. “If Andrei (Rodrigues) can delay it one more week, since it is a holiday, the bank will not go bankrupt. Try to call him and persuade him if you think it is possible,” Vorcaro wrote to the Supreme Court judge.
Two days before his arrest, the former Banco Master executive even suggested to De Moraes: “Can’t we reverse this with Paulo or Andrei? It’s outrageous!”
Also, according to messages collected by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, Vorcaro allegedly asked the Supreme Court judge to meet up to three times in the days leading up to his detention, confirming time and place in some cases. “At 2:00 p.m., then. Should I come by your house or mine?” he said in one of the messages.
In the wake of the dissemination of these messages, Brazil’s attorney general, Paulo Gonet, has requested the annulment of the Federal Police report that records the exchange, stating that the judge in the Banco Master case, André Mendonça—also from the Supreme Court—”used the Police” to “impose the investigation” of his peer by carrying out “activities that were not his responsibility.”
“It is not the judge’s role to accuse, much less to conduct preliminary investigations,” the attorney general said in the corresponding document, reported by Folha.
A Supreme Court magistrate can only be investigated with the authorization of their colleagues on the court. According to Gonet, the report prepared by the Federal Police at Mendonça’s request constitutes, in itself, an investigation and, therefore, must be invalidated.
“The order given to the police authority to investigate specific individuals, without a request from the Prosecutor’s Office and without the police authority’s own initiative, is null and void, as it exceeds the magistrate’s jurisdiction in the pre-trial phase,” he argued.
Gonet argued that even if the Police had found conversations between De Moraes and Vorcaro during the investigation and had requested an investigation from the rapporteur, it was Judge Mendonça’s responsibility to forward the request to the Supreme Court president, Edson Fachin, so that he could send it to the full court for analysis.
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“By requesting that the elements of the investigation be examined, regardless of who the competent authority was, the rapporteur minister imposed the investigation on Minister Alexandre de Moraes, which ended up occurring in almost 190 of the 218 pages that make up the police report,” the attorney general pointed out.
The conversations between Vorcaro and Moraes are in the material seized from the former banker’s mobile phone, material that the Police had managed to recover, although it had not analyzed it until Judge Mendonça ordered the Federal Police to prepare a report on the messages within 72 hours and subsequently sent the document to the Attorney General’s Office for review.
For his part, Mendonça has requested a plenary session of the STF to analyze messages indicating communication between his peer De Moraes and Daniel Vorcaro, arguing that it is “the inevitable path” and the “sovereign body to analyze, technically and strictly legally,” the evidence presented by the Federal Police.
The rapporteur of the Master case states that the plenary must analyze the case regardless of the position of the Attorney General’s Office and that “it must take place publicly and transparently,” in an in-person session, “as it could not be otherwise, due to the constitutional imperative and the undeniable consequence of the democratic and republican model.”
The case has shaken Brazilian politics, in which the main rival of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, seeking re-election, the far-right Flávio Bolsonaro, has had to reject accusations of irregular financing precisely linked to his relationship with Vorcaro.
“There was no kind of consideration for this investor during my term in the Senate. It was sponsorship that did not involve any transfer,” he said last Friday, denying that his exchanges with the banker derived from the financing of the film “Dark Horse”—a film centered on the figure of his father, the former president convicted for attempted coup Jair Bolsonaro—implied any kind of consideration in his work as a senator.
Now, the revelation derived from Judge Mendonça’s decisions has turned the board around, focusing attention on a De Moraes perceived by many almost as an ally of Lula.
In this regard, a Supreme Court magistrate warned in statements to Folha that “the STF, which was already facing some animosity from the population in the electoral landscape, now fully enters the hurricane.” “He (Mendonça) has lit the fuse inside the fuel depot. He has opened the doors of the Supreme Court to hell, and no one knows what the consequences will be,” he continued, also pointing to a hypothetical future impeachment process of more than one member of the Court.
The same magistrate says he believes that, in the event of an electoral victory by Flávio Bolsonaro, Mendonça would become one of the most powerful people in Brazil, through whom the appointments of at least three future Supreme Court magistrates for vacancies that will open in the next government would pass.
Another STF judge, in statements to the same newspaper, called the methods and timing chosen by Mendonça, as well as the leak, “very questionable.”
“Here we all conduct investigations, and the procedure and form are always respected, something he has not done in this case,” he lamented before pointing out that it is “obvious” that the situation benefits Flávio Bolsonaro.
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