A Brazilian Banker Hired $1.5m of Influencers to Attack His Regulator

Politics

Key Facts

—The raid. Federal police searched the adman Thiago Miranda on Thursday, in the tenth phase of the investigation into the collapsed Banco Master.

—The programme. Contracts with digital influencers, signed through Miranda’s agency, totalled R$8m ($1.55m) across roughly 40 social-media accounts.

—The trigger. The central bank had blocked the sale of Banco Master to a state-owned bank, and the official whose department recommended that veto became the campaign’s main target.

—The scripts. Internal documents supplied headlines, images and video outlines to each account, and several were published word for word.

—The dossier. Police say the same agency compiled a confidential file on the chief executive of Itaú Unibanco, Milton Maluhy Filho, and on his wife.

—The reversal. Miranda had until Thursday been treated as a witness, and had himself given information to investigators.

The Banco Master affair has been a banking scandal since the arrest of its owner last November, and it turned this week into something a foreign investor should find more alarming: a private financier accused of buying public opinion to punish the regulator who stopped him.

On Thursday federal police searched the homes and offices of Thiago Miranda, an advertising executive who once co-owned a celebrity news portal. The warrant was authorised by André Mendonça, the Supreme Court justice overseeing the case.

Miranda ran the communications operation defending Banco Master after its collapse. Police allege that operation extended to recruiting influencers to attack Brazil’s central bank, intimidating journalists, and illegally obtaining confidential material about its targets, including their banking records.

Why the Banco Master campaign chose its target

The sequence is the point, and it is not complicated. The central bank refused to let Banco Master be sold to Banco de Brasília, a bank owned by the federal district’s government.

The recommendation to veto came from the department run by Renato Gomes, then a director of the central bank. He duly became the principal target of the paid publications.

Documents from the operation, which its own authors named after the banker’s initials, went beyond hiring people to be rude online. They specified the headlines.

One account was handed the line that Gomes was leaving but the damage to the financial market would remain. It published that line.

Another ran a piece describing a central bank weakened by wrong decisions. That one appeared two days before Gomes actually left.

Eight million reais, forty accounts

The contracts signed through Miranda’s agency added up to eight million reais, about one and a half million dollars. Police have identified roughly forty accounts drawn into the effort.

The sums were not trivial by the standards of the trade. A television presenter with more than twenty-four million followers held a contract worth five hundred thousand reais a month, about ninety-seven thousand dollars, for six months of posts.

On our arithmetic that single arrangement, if it had run its full term, would have absorbed close to two-fifths of the entire programme. Smaller accounts took two hundred thousand reais, or thirty-five thousand, for a handful of posts.

The money moved in a straight line. The agency received three and a half million reais from a company tied to the banker and his brother-in-law, and paid out precisely that amount to the people it had hired.

Less than half the programme was ever executed. Most of the contracts stopped in January, when the federal police began investigating the bombardment of the central bank.

The reporter and the bank chief

Two names in the police file explain why this stopped being a public-relations story. The first is Malu Gaspar of O Globo, the reporter who first exposed the bank’s suspicious dealings.

Investigators say Miranda’s team built daily reports on her private life and trawled old court files, hunting for anything that might discredit her and halt her reporting. The second name is Milton Maluhy Filho, who runs Itaú Unibanco, Latin America’s largest private bank.

According to the police, the banker sent Miranda a message asking for a background check on Maluhy, saying the executive was causing him a great deal of trouble. Weeks later, Miranda reported the file was ready.

The document is said to have contained personal and financial details of Maluhy and his wife. Itaú declined to comment.

The witness who became a target

Until Thursday morning Miranda was a witness. He had spoken to the police and to journalists about the influencer operation, and about the banker’s financing of a documentary on former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Then investigators read the messages on the banker’s phone. What they found in his own conversations with Miranda persuaded them that the adman had not merely observed the surveillance of the journalist, but conducted it.

Miranda has not been charged and has not been convicted. Reuters could not reach him after the raid and could not locate his lawyers; the banker’s defence has also said nothing.

What is Banco Master and why does this matter abroad?

Banco Master was a mid-sized Brazilian lender liquidated by the central bank last year, in a case involving alleged fraudulent management and money laundering. The new allegations move it from a question about one bank to a question about whether a regulator can act without being attacked for it.

Did the influencers know who was paying?

No source establishes that they did, and several have said otherwise. One with millions of followers confirmed receiving payment but denied signing anything involving the banker or the bank, and a news outlet confirmed its contract while denying that content was agreed in advance.

What should an investor watch next?

Whether the material seized on Thursday widens the case beyond the bank and into the accounts that carried its message. The reputational risk now sits with the influencers and outlets that took the money, not only with the people who paid it.