A Court Keeps Its Watchdog Inside the Firm That Bid for Banco Master

Courts

Key Facts

—The ruling. On 3 July the São Paulo appeals court refused Fictor’s request to remove or restrict the monitoring agent placed inside the group.

—The monitor. Kroll Associates Brasil, the local arm of the global investigations firm, was appointed by the judge to watch the group day to day.

—The debt. Fictor entered judicial reorganization with liabilities of roughly R$4.3bn ($835m), and 43 companies fall inside the case.

—The other fight. Creditors have separately asked the court to dismiss Laspro Consultores, the administrator, over how it proposes to value their claims.

—The fee question. The appeals judge kept the monitor in place but gave the lower court ten days to explain how its fees were calculated.

—Why it matters. Fictor is the group that announced it would buy Banco Master hours before the central bank shut the lender down.

The Fictor judicial reorganization has produced a rare sight in a Brazilian court: everybody wants somebody else removed. This week a judge said no to one of them.

Fictor is the Brazilian conglomerate that announced, on a November afternoon in twenty twenty-five, that it would buy the troubled lender Banco Master. Hours later the central bank liquidated the bank instead.

Fictor never got the bank. What it got was a reputational collapse of its own, and by February it was asking a court for protection from its creditors.

What the Fictor judicial reorganization now involves

A judicial reorganization is Brazil’s equivalent of Chapter Eleven, a court-run process that freezes debt collection while a company tries to agree a repayment plan. Judge Fernanda Perez Jacomini of the third bankruptcy court in São Paulo is running this one.

The scale is easy to miss. According to the court-appointed administrator’s public case file, forty-three separate companies sit inside the proceeding.

Count them by type and the shape of the group appears. Around half are power ventures, solar and thermal project vehicles, while nine make food, animal feed or trade grain, and the rest range from payments and insurance broking to a logistics hotel.

That is a conglomerate assembled by acquisition rather than grown, and it is the reason the accounting has proved so hard to unpick. Total liabilities run to about four and three tenths billion reais, roughly eight hundred and thirty-five million dollars.

Why the Fictor judicial reorganization has a watchdog

Brazilian insolvency law provides for an administrator, a professional firm that verifies claims and reports to the judge. Here that role belongs to Laspro Consultores.

The judge went further and appointed a second layer, a monitoring agent the market calls a watchdog. She chose Kroll Associates Brasil, whose brief is to shadow the group daily and flag any risk to the estate.

Fictor appealed against that on the thirtieth of June. It argued the watchdog has no express basis in the insolvency statute, that the reorganization is already supervised by the administrator, the prosecutors, a creditors’ committee and the judge herself, and that the appointment duplicates all of them.

The group also objected to the bill. Citing its own appeal, Money Times reported the administrator’s provisional fee at six hundred and forty-five thousand reais a month, with Kroll’s first month plus a retrospective review adding several hundred thousand more.

On the third of July the appeals court dismissed the request in full, keeping Kroll in place with an unrestricted remit. Fictor had asked as a fallback that the retrospective review of events before the filing be dropped, and that was refused too.

The fight the debtors are not having

Now the part that inverts the usual picture. A second removal request is moving through the same case, and it does not come from the company.

Creditors have asked the court to dismiss Laspro, the administrator, according to reporting by the Brazilian business outlet NeoFeed. Their objection is to a valuation method.

The administrator has argued that the joint-venture contracts Fictor used to raise money from investors were shams, lacking authorization for that kind of fundraising. If the contracts are void, it reasons, the relationship is simply a loan.

The consequence is arithmetical and severe. A creditor’s claim would become the money put in, minus whatever was already withdrawn as redemptions or returns, indexed for inflation, rather than the investment plus the profits once promised.

Laspro defends this as parity among creditors, arguing that anyone who took money out before the collapse should not now claim as though they had not. Lawyers for creditors call it an aberration that rewards the architect of the scheme.

What to watch, and when

The administrator’s own filings describe unsigned balance sheets, missing bank statements, company accounts registered to shareholders’ personal tax numbers and instant transfers to individuals later reclassified as related-party loans. Fictor’s reorganization plan was filed on the twenty-third of June.

The date to mark is the seventeenth of July. By then Laspro must lodge its verified list of creditors, the very document whose method the creditors are contesting.

For a foreign observer the read-through is not really about one conglomerate. It is that the wreckage of Banco Master keeps surfacing in other balance sheets, from a cancer-clinic chain to the group that tried to rescue the bank.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a watchdog in a Brazilian insolvency case?

It is an independent monitoring agent appointed by the judge to shadow a company in reorganization, examine its documents and transactions, and report irregularities to the court. Fictor argued the role has no express basis in the insolvency statute, but the São Paulo appeals court kept it in place on 3 July.

Why do creditors want the administrator removed?

Laspro Consultores proposed treating the investment contracts as void loans, so a claim would equal money invested minus sums already withdrawn, indexed for inflation. Creditors say that method drastically cuts what victims can recover, while the administrator defends it as equal treatment among creditors.

What does this have to do with Banco Master?

Fictor announced in November 2025 that it would buy Banco Master with Emirati investors, and the central bank liquidated the lender the next day. Fictor says the reputational damage from that episode drained its liquidity and led to its own filing.