Regulators Never Saw Moraes’s Wife, Hired for R$129 Million by Brazilian Lender Banco Master

BRASILIA — The law firm of Viviane Barci de Moraes, wife of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, signed a contract worth about R$129 million (roughly $24 million) with Banco Master to represent the bank before four federal bodies. Two of them, the Central Bank and the antitrust agency Cade, have no record of her work, according to Revista Oeste. In a program titled “Moraes and Banco Master: the fraud that lays bare judicial activism,” the magazine’s Brasilia reporters argue the record now points to the justice, not his wife, as the real hire.

The contract promised work at the Revenue Service, the National Treasury’s legal office, the Central Bank and Cade. The two regulators that mattered most to Banco Master say she never showed up. The only service left to bill was a compliance manual, at R$3.6 million a month.

Banco Master, run by banker Daniel Vorcaro, was shut down by the Central Bank in November 2025, a day after Vorcaro’s first arrest, in what investigators describe as a multibillion-real fraud built on securities the bank could not honor. Vorcaro was arrested again on March 4, 2026. The case has since shaken the Federal Police itself: the Lula regime’s police removed the detectives who got close to the Supreme Court, and the force’s own delegates later said their director cannot rewrite the Master reports.

Why it matters

Moraes is the most powerful judge in Brazil, the second-largest democracy in the Americas. He runs the Supreme Court’s fake news inquiry, opened on the court’s own initiative in 2019, which has targeted critics of the court and of the electoral system that delivered a 2022 result millions of Brazilians still dispute. If the man who decides who is a threat to democracy was also protecting a failed bank, every ruling from that inquiry deserves a second look, including those that reached American platforms and U.S.-based Brazilians.

What the messages show

Federal Police recovered deleted WhatsApp messages from Vorcaro’s phone. In them the banker tells his then-girlfriend, Martha Graeff, that on February 26, 2025, the month Hugo Motta took over the Chamber of Deputies, he was “at a dinner at the official residence with Hugo and six businessmen.” In another he writes that “Hugo and Ciro arrived here to talk to Alexandre.” Messages later obtained by the congressional inquiry into pension fraud describe an August 2025 meeting at the Senate president’s official residence, held by Davi Alcolumbre, that ran until midnight, with Vorcaro admitting he showed up unannounced. Motta declined to comment.

The phone also holds a December 2024 exchange in which Vorcaro, angry at a left-wing site that covered his bank, says the outlet “will go into the fake news case” and that he will “shut this site down.” Revista Oeste’s reporters asked the obvious question: who, in that sentence, owns the fake news inquiry? The site denies receiving any payment.

The record

Confirmed: the contract, its value and its four federal targets; the Central Bank and Cade saying they found no visits or filings by her; the Federal Police recovery of the messages. Viviane Barci de Moraes says her firm wrote 36 legal opinions and held 94 meetings for the bank and never acted for it at the Supreme Court. Alleged: Revista Oeste’s argument that Moraes acted as a “hidden partner” of the bank and that the compliance manual is a cover story. Moraes has not addressed the messages publicly.

A justice whose wife billed a collapsing bank for work regulators cannot find, and whose inquiry a banker treated as a place to bury his enemies, is the pattern critics of the court have described for years. Brazil’s Congress holds the only tool that can test it, and its two presidents appear in the same phone.

The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sources: Revista Oeste (YouTube program “Moraes e Banco Master” and reporting of Dec. 17, 2025, and March 5, 2026), Gazeta do Povo, O Globo, Federal Police messages cited in court records.

Featured image: Sessão da Primeira Turma do STF – 30062026 by Antonio Augusto/STF, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.