A retired Army colonel, who had at least six meetings with Jair Bolsonaro (PL) at the Planalto and Alvorada palaces in 2019, is mentioned as an informant by the former president in a meeting about the case of the “rachadinhas” involving his son Flávio Bolsonaro. Justice Alexandre de Moraes, of the STF, made public an audio from August 2020 in which the former president discussed the use of the federal machine to annul the investigation. At the meeting, the former president committed to contacting the Federal Revenue Service and Serpro to seek evidence of illegal access to Flávio’s data.
In addition to Bolsonaro, the meeting was attended by the then head of the Institutional Security Cabinet, Augusto Heleno, the then director general of Abin (Brazilian Intelligence Agency) Alexandre Ramagem (PL) and two of Flávio’s lawyers, Luciana Pires and Juliana Bierrenbach.
The meeting took place on August 25, 2020. Bolsonaro said that the person who passed the information to him was “an Army colonel” and, in an apparent irony, added that he should “have exchanged it for the Russian secret service.”
Then, Bolsonaro says he has forgotten his name, at which point Augusto Heleno says he knows who the person is, but also shows some hesitation in remembering. He mentioned “Magela”, and Bolsonaro repeated the name.
According to Folha de São Paulo, sources close to the case say that, in reality, the person mentioned is Carlos Alberto Pereira Leonel Marsiglia, a retired Army colonel.
Bolsonaro’s public agenda records during the presidency reveal that he met with Marsiglia six times in the first half of 2019, five of which were private meetings. The first took place on March 28 and the last on May 23.
The only meeting in which Bolsonaro’s agenda indicates the presence of more participants was on May 22, the day before the last meeting, when the ministers of the Civil House, Onyx Lorenzoni, and the Economy, Paulo Guedes, were present.
Marsíglia is the brother of an auditor at the Federal Revenue Service of Rio de Janeiro. He and other colleagues were involved in a dispute with the agency. The case was used by Flávio Bolsonaro’s defense to argue that there was illegal access to tax data through the Federal Revenue Service.
In total, five tax auditors from Rio de Janeiro were being investigated on suspicion of illicit enrichment. They say they are targets of an internal persecution based on fabricated complaints and illegal access to their tax data.
According to a hypothesis that Flávio Bolsonaro’s defense presented to the government and the PGR, the two agencies of the Federal Revenue Service in Rio, the Office of Internal Affairs of the 7th Fiscal Region (Escor07) and the Office of Research and Investigation of the 7th Fiscal Region (Espei07), would have criminally accessed the senator’s tax data and produced the report of Coaf (a financial intelligence agency linked to the Ministry of Economy) that originated, in 2018, the investigation against the president’s son.
Flávio Bolsonaro and other parliamentarians in the Assembly were investigated on suspicion of practicing corruption by appropriating part of the salaries of their aides, in addition to other possible irregularities.
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