Brazil’s Top Prosecutor Is in Business With a Man Who Hosts Supreme Court Justices

BRASILIA — Brazil’s Prosecutor General, Paulo Gonet, the official who signed the indictment that sent former president Jair Bolsonaro to trial, is a business partner of an entrepreneur whose association has collected more than R$5 million (about US$930,000) in public contracts while staging events with Supreme Court justices, the newspaper Estadão reported on Nov. 8. The company the two share is run out of the same office, with the same phone number and the same accountant, as the businesses that sell those events.

The man who decides whom Brazil prosecutes owns a company with the man who books the justices who rule on those prosecutions. Nobody in Brasília has explained where the lecture business ends and the public office begins.

According to Estadão, Gonet registered Direito em Perspectiva Estudos Científicos with the Goiás Commercial Board in April 2025. The firm sells courses, lectures and teaching material. Its other partner, and its administrator, is Zilmar Santana de Assis, who also runs the Associação Brasileira de Formação e Pesquisa (ABFP) and owns Gooleran Academia de Formação e Pesquisa. Gonet’s company is registered at the same commercial office in western Goiânia as Gooleran, and shares a phone line and an accountant with ABFP.

In the 19 months since the partnership began, ABFP signed at least 55 contracts with public bodies and professional councils, worth more than R$5 million. The paying clients include the state banks Caixa Econômica Federal and BNDES, as well as municipal consortiums. In the same month Gonet’s company was registered, ABFP received R$348,000 from Cioeste, a consortium of cities in the São Paulo metro area, for a seminar featuring Justice Gilmar Mendes. ABFP events have also featured Justice Flávio Dino, and Gonet himself spoke at no fewer than four of them.

Why it matters

The Prosecutor General is the only official who can bring criminal charges against a sitting president, ministers and members of Congress before the Supreme Court. Gonet was appointed by Lula in December 2023 and reappointed in 2025 for a second two-year term. Under his signature, the case against Bolsonaro reached the Court, which convicted the former president in September 2025. The same justices who judge the cases Gonet brings are the ones whose public appearances his business partner organizes and sells to state entities. For American readers, the closest comparison would be the Attorney General co-owning a company with the promoter who books Supreme Court justices for paid speaking events funded by federal agencies.

The ties are not new. Gonet co-founded the IDP law school in Brasília with Gilmar Mendes and co-authored with him one of Brazil’s best-known constitutional law textbooks. Brazil’s prosecutors’ statute, the Organic Law of the Federal Public Ministry, bars members from taking part in commercial companies except as shareholders or quota holders. With Zilmar listed as administrator, the arrangement fits that exception on paper. Whether it fits the spirit of a law written to keep prosecutors out of business is the question nobody in charge has answered.

The record

What is documented, per Estadão: the company registration, the shared address, phone and accountant, the 55 contracts, the R$348,000 Cioeste payment and Gonet’s appearances at ABFP events. Estadão did not find public contracts signed directly by Gonet’s company, and ABFP’s contract volume in the 19 months before the partnership was higher, around R$7 million. There is no allegation, so far, that Gonet steered any contract. Gonet declined to comment through his press office; Zilmar and ABFP did not respond. The contracting bodies said they followed technical criteria.

What the record shows is a pattern Brazilians already know well: the prosecutor, the justices and the event business moving in the same small circle, paid in part with public money, under a regime whose 2022 victory millions of Brazilians still dispute. Earlier this week, justices were reported to be working to pick the Senate leader who could judge them, and Estadão itself called the electoral case against the ruling ticket a “certainty of impunity”. In a country where the people who accuse, judge and lecture share an office address, accountability is the one product nobody is selling.

The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sources: Estadão reporting of Nov. 8, 2026; Goiás Commercial Board records as cited by Estadão; Organic Law of the Federal Public Ministry (Complementary Law 75/1993).

Featured image: Paulo Gonet by TSE – Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.