Brazil Supreme Feud Escalates: Alexandre de Moraes Edited Wife’s Contract With Banco Master, Records Show

BRAZIL · JUSTICE

Brazil’s Supreme Court slid deeper into open internal conflict on Monday, as two revelations put Justice Alexandre de Moraes at the center of the Banco Master scandal — and his colleague André Mendonça moved a step closer to forcing a formal investigation.

A message about “protection”

Justice André Mendonça, the rapporteur of the Banco Master case, has asked prosecutor-general Paulo Gonet for complementary information about a WhatsApp message that investigators attribute to Daniel Vorcaro, the bank’s owner, who has been in jail since March.

According to a Federal Police report sent to the court, the message speaks of the need to count on the “protection” of two men named only as “Andrei” and “Paulo”. Investigators identified them as Andrei Rodrigues, the director-general of the Federal Police, and Paulo Gonet himself, the prosecutor-general of the Republic.

The police initially did not know to whom the message had been addressed. Investigators later concluded the recipient was Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The revelation came from the portal Metrópoles and was confirmed by CNN Brasil with two sources who follow the investigations.

Mendonça’s request does not open an investigation. But it puts the question formally on the prosecutor’s desk — the same prosecutor who in December shelved a request to investigate Moraes, citing an “absolute absence of minimum evidence”. CNN said it sought comment from Moraes, Rodrigues and Gonet and received no reply.

The contract the justice edited himself

Hours later, a second bombshell landed. Metadata from a document extracted from Vorcaro’s seized phone show that Moraes personally edited the final version of a R$131 million (about US$25.3 million, at roughly 5.19 reais to the dollar on 1 September) legal-services contract between his wife’s law firm and Vorcaro’s bank, the newspaper Estadão reported.

The file’s properties record the edit under an Office 365 profile named “Ministro Alexandre de Moraes” at 11:04 p.m. on 15 January 2024 — about an hour and forty minutes after Vorcaro had returned the draft with review marks to Viviane Barci de Moraes, the justice’s wife.

Her firm, Barci de Moraes, confirmed that the justice accessed and edited the contract. In a statement, it said its compliance department had asked him — as the husband of the managing partner — about possible legal impediments to the engagement, and that he had never judged any case involving Banco Master.

The contract called for 36 monthly installments of R$3 million net (about US$578,000 each). Congressional investigators found the bank actually paid 22 installments of R$3.65 million (about US$703,000) between February 2024 and November 2025, when the Central Bank liquidated Master. A separate Estadão survey calculated that the couple’s real-estate assets grew 266 percent since 2017, from R$8.6 million to R$31.5 million (about US$1.7 million to US$6.1 million).

A court at war with itself

The Master scandal has corroded the Supreme Court since the start of the year. In February, Justice Dias Toffoli — then the case’s rapporteur — stepped aside after police documented at least ten meetings between him and Vorcaro and R$35 million (about US$6.7 million) in payments from a Vorcaro-linked fund to a company owned by Toffoli’s family. The case passed to Mendonça.

Moraes has denied receiving messages from Vorcaro on the day of the banker’s first arrest in November 2025, calling the reports “lying conjecture” and part of an orchestrated attack on the court. Police records show the banker wrote to the justice asking for news and whether anything could be “blocked”; the replies, investigators say, came in single-view messages that erase themselves.

The relationship had a social side too. In April 2024 Vorcaro bankrolled a legal forum in London attended by Moraes, Toffoli, Gonet and police chief Rodrigues — including a Macallan whisky tasting that cost about R$3.3 million (US$640,832) at the time. Records show Vorcaro consulted Moraes on the guest list and blocked a businessman the justice wanted excluded.

In April, the rapporteur of a Senate inquiry into organized crime formally requested the indictment of Toffoli, Moraes, Gilmar Mendes and Gonet over their handling of the affair. Gonet has publicly said he sees, so far, no evidence of crimes by the justices.

Why the case matters

Banco Master’s collapse is the largest bank fraud in Brazilian history. The Central Bank decreed its liquidation in November 2025, and investigators estimate the hole at R$40 billion or more (about US$7.7 billion), much of it covered by the privately funded deposit-guarantee fund. Our in-depth account of the scheme is in Inside Brazil’s Biggest-Ever Bank Fraud: The Banco Master Scandal.

Vorcaro, arrested again in March in the third phase of Operation Compliance Zero — on Mendonça’s order and against the prosecutor’s advice — is negotiating a plea bargain that could name names the seized phones have not reached. His hearing in a related case was postponed last week, as we reported.

What happens next runs through Gonet. If the prosecutor-general answers Mendonça’s request and sees grounds, he could ask the court itself to authorize an investigation of one of its own — a step with no modern precedent, and one that would land the decision back in the hands of Moraes’s ten colleagues.

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Sources: Metrópoles (Andreza Matais column, 1 September 2026); CNN Brasil (1 September 2026); Estadão / Blog do Fausto Macedo (1 September 2026); Poder360; Gazeta do Povo; Senate CPI do Crime Organizado report. Exchange rate: about 5.19 reais per US dollar, Investing.com, 1 September 2026.

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