Brazilian State Bank Banco do Brasil Calls Dallagnol’s Criticism ‘Disinformation’

BRASILIA — Banco do Brasil, the bank controlled by Brazil’s federal government, sent senator-elect Deltan Dallagnol a formal legal notice accusing him of spreading “disinformation” and warning that his posts had “the potential even to cause social instability,” according to the document, obtained by the Coluna do Estadão, a political column of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. The notice, sent on Nov. 3, gave Dallagnol 24 hours to delete the posts and said the bank could take him to court, “including in the criminal sphere.” The posts came down.

What Dallagnol said, in posts on Oct. 31, was that the bank’s chief executive, Tarciana Medeiros, was a “friend of Janja,” as first lady Rosângela da Silva is known, and that she was about to lose her job. He used the posts to promote a paid subscription on X for “exclusive content” at R$25 a month. The bank says it left out “offensive” passages of a video Dallagnol has since deleted. He had first described the threat in a video on Nov. 7; the document now shows the bank’s own words.

Who is who

Dallagnol led the federal prosecutors’ task force in Operation Car Wash, the corruption investigation that sent Lula to prison in 2018 before the Supreme Court annulled his convictions. He was elected to the lower house for the state of Paraná in 2022 with more votes than any other candidate there, and in May 2023 Brazil’s electoral court unanimously stripped him of the seat, ruling that he had left the prosecution service to avoid disciplinary cases that could have made him ineligible. In October, Paraná sent him to the Senate on the Novo party ticket. Medeiros, a career employee of the bank, was appointed by Lula in January 2023 and is the first woman to run the institution.

Why it matters

Banco do Brasil is one of the largest banks in Latin America, majority-owned by the federal government, with its chief executive chosen by the president. A state company is now borrowing the vocabulary of “disinformation,” the same label Brazilian courts have used to justify years of takedown orders, and aiming it at an incoming senator. For American readers, the closest picture would be a federally controlled lender threatening a senator-elect with criminal charges over a post about its CEO.

The letter calls the content “completely unfounded and sensationalist,” says “there is no right to disinformation” and accuses Dallagnol of using an “attack on a state company” as “a subterfuge to attract clicks and profit from the sale of online subscriptions.” It does not say what social instability a post about one executive’s job could cause. It is not the first such letter: in July the bank demanded a right of reply from the Brasília bank workers’ union, which had mocked Medeiros in a satire.

The timing is the argument. The supposed disinformation was a forecast that Medeiros would lose her job. On Nov. 13, Estadão reported that weak third-quarter results had raised pressure for her exit and that, even before the numbers came out, sources in the Lula regime considered her replacement “almost certain.” The bank reported adjusted net income of R$1.27 billion, down 66.5% from a year earlier, against the R$3.3 billion analysts expected; and its shares fell 8.35% in one session, according to Times Brasil.

Dallagnol said he was “shocked” and accused the bank of trying to censor him. “It is she who owes Brazilians an explanation for the fall in profit, for the plunge in Banco do Brasil’s shares and for the attempt to censor legitimate criticism,” he said.

The record

Confirmed: the notice, its date, its wording, the 24-hour deadline and the threat of criminal action, all in the document published by Estadão, and the removal of the posts. The quarterly figures are the bank’s own. The bank did not comment. Not established: the full content of the deleted video, Dallagnol’s claim that Medeiros is a friend of the first lady, what instability the bank had in mind, and her replacement, which rests on anonymous sources.

A state bank that lost two-thirds of its quarterly profit spent its legal muscle on a prediction about its chief executive’s job that the regime’s own people are now repeating in private. When “disinformation” is the word for an opinion that may simply turn out to be early, the label stops describing facts and starts protecting appointees. Dallagnol takes his Senate seat in February, with constitutional protection for what he says. The open question is whether the Lula regime’s state companies, which share its appetite for policing speech, will respect it.

The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sources: Coluna do Estadão (O Estado de S. Paulo), Banco do Brasil’s extrajudicial notice as published by Estadão, Times Brasil, Diário do Poder.

Featured image: Discussão e votação de propostas. Dep. Deltan Dallagnol (PODE – PR) by Pablo Valadares/Câmara dos Deputados, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.