The statement issued by the defense team of jailed banker Daniel Vorcaro — owner of Banco Master — drew little attention over the weekend, overshadowed by the preventive detention of former president Jair Bolsonaro. But its message is clear: it seeks to reframe the bank’s collapse as a technical dispute over credit-market routines and mistakes made by outside firms. The core argument is that the credit portfolios sold to Banco de Brasília (BRB) were originated by independent companies and that Master should not be held responsible for the problems that followed. It is a convenient narrative. But it runs straight into one unavoidable fact: this involved R$12 billion, not a small pilot program in retail lending. At that scale, outsourcing is never incidental.
The weakness in the argument is obvious to anyone familiar with basic banking rules. When a bank sells credit, it is responsible for the substance of what it is selling — regardless of who “originated” it. Central Bank documents show that the main originator, Tirreno, was created only weeks before the transactions, lacked the capacity to produce consignado loans, and was managed by individuals linked to Master’s own corporate network. The defense describes a legitimate supply chain. Supervisors describe an internal structure dressed up as an external one. The gap between those descriptions is factual, not interpretative.
The statement also recasts the multibillion-real portfolio substitutions as evidence of good faith, as if replacing R$10 billion in credits were a routine customer-service gesture. According to the Central Bank, the replacements happened because borrowers denied taking the loans, documentation did not match, and cash flows never appeared. What the defense calls diligence, regulators see as a direct consequence of structural flaws. And the numbers speak for themselves: institutions do not replace R$10 billion in operations by mistake.
Finally, blaming court-ordered measures for Master’s liquidation ignores the Central Bank’s own assessment, which shows a deterioration beginning in 2024 and growing reliance on fragile portfolios to support liquidity. The bank did not fall because of Federal Police action; it fell because there was no real credit behind what it was selling. The defense tries to frame the episode as a misunderstanding driven by third parties. But in any serious financial system, R$12 billion in unsupported credits is not a misunderstanding — it is a breakdown of responsibility.