São Paulo Prosecutors Investigate Environment Minister Salles’ Suspicious Enrichment

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – The São Paulo Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the suspected illegal enrichment of Environment Minister Ricardo Salles between 2012 and 2017, a period during which he switched between his activities as a lawyer and positions in the São Paulo government.

The prosecution has called for the breach of Salles’ banking and tax confidentiality, although the measure has twice been denied by state courts this month.

The investigation began in July from a request made by a company named Sppatrim Administração e Participações, which aroused suspicion over the progress of Salles’ wealth based on the declarations of assets that he himself provided to the Electoral Court.

In 2012, when he was a candidate for the PSDB party, Salles declared he had R$1.4 million in assets, mostly in financial investments, a ten percent stake in an apartment, a car and a motorcycle.

In 2018, when the federal deputy moved to another political party (Novo), he declared assets of R$8.8 million: two apartments of R$3 million each, R$2.3 million in investments and a boat of R$500,000 — a 335 percent increase over five years, correcting the value by inflation.

In a note, the Environment Ministry’s advisory team told Estado newspaper that “the minister’s assets and income have always been adequately declared to the Federal Treasury” and that “the representation itself brings nothing different from what is there.”

For almost half of the period under investigation, Salles held positions in the state government.

He was private secretary to former governor Geraldo Alckmin between March 2013 and November 2014, a position for which he was paid R$12,400 net, and secretary of the Environment in the same administration, between July 2016 and August 2017, with an average salary of R$18,400.

In the request for breach of bank record confidentiality, which Estado accessed, prosecutor Ricardo Manuel Castro points out that, in 2014, Salles claimed a reduction in his income because of his public office in a petition to the courts to reduce the pension paid to his two children. He achieved a decision to reduce the amount from R$8,500 to R$5,000.

The prosecutor claims that Salles acted in ten cases as a lawyer during the period and that in the records “sufficient case figures were not found to the point of warranting the payment of fees in such a volume that it could support such an increase in assets.”

The prosecutor refers to the fact that Salles’ assets evolved during the period in which he was charged with defrauding the administration’s plan for an environmental protection area when he was a secretary in São Paulo, in order to benefit mining companies.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office sued him for administrative misconduct in December 2018. He denies responsibility and appealed the decision.

In addition to the breach of banking confidentiality, prosecutor Castro asked for a report from the Financial Activities Control Council (COAF) pointing out that the control body had already reported the “existence of compulsorily reported transactions” related to Salles’ tax identification registry (CPF), but did not send the report.

The request, however, was denied in both instances by the São Paulo courts. In his decision, judge Marcos de Lima Porta, of the 5th Circuit Court of Public Finance, states that the fact that the minister himself had issued the statement of his assets “already points to his good faith” and that the progress of his assets occurred during a “reasonable period”.