⚽ Banco Master and... football?

Last November, a private jet owned by Brazilian businessman and ex-senator Luiz Osvaldo Pastore took off en route to Lima, Peru, to watch the Copa Libertadores final between Flamengo and Palmeiras. One of the more than 10 passengers aboard the flight was Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli, a diehard Palmeiras fan. Also hitching a ride to the match was lawyer Augusto de Arruda Botelho, an ex-justice secretary and equally partial to São Paulo’s team in green.

After leaving the government in January 2024, Arruda Botelho went back to practicing law, and at the time of his flight to Lima, he was representing Luiz Antônio Bull, the compliance director of the then-liquidated lender Banco Master. Bull had been arrested alongside CEO Daniel Vorcaro just over a week before the Libertadores final.

The eve of the final — and the day of the jet trip to Peru alongside Arruda Botelho — Justice Toffoli was made rapporteur of the Banco Master investigation in the Supreme Court. Three days later, he sought to place the case’s proceedings under strict secrecy.

Toffoli’s private jet ride to Lima is one of many cases in Brazilian history of the proximity of judicial power, business leaders, politics and scandal, and how the boundaries between them can easily be blurred against the backdrop of a game of football.

But the Master case’s links to the national sport are not merely incidental, with a number of major clubs tied up in the scandal’s web, to some degree or another…

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