BANCOOP case

The BANCOOP case is the name used by the Brazilian press for the alleged use of BANCOOP (Housing Cooperative Bank of São Paulo) to benefit the slush funds of the Workers Party (PT), in 2002 and 2004. On October 28, 2010, Judge Patricia Inigo Funes e Silva, of the 5th Criminal Court of São Paulo, accepted the complaint against João Vaccari Neto and five other people involved in the case of embezzlement through BANCOOP.

Founded in 1996, by Representative Ricardo Berzoini (the current president of the Workers Party), BANCOOP had been investigated by prosecutors since 2007 for money laundering, overpricing and diversion of resources. The financial situation of the company provided evidence of the malpractice.

BANCOOP was one of the largest real estate developers in the state of São Paulo, with more than 15,000 members, and even received large financial contributions totaling more than R$40 million, since 2003, mostly through pension funds controlled by people linked to the PT. By 2010, it was estimated to have a deficit of more than R$100 million.

On March 10, 2010, the magazine Veja revealed that the Public Ministry of São Paulo would have had access to more than 8,000 pages of bank records of transactions carried out by BANCOOP between 2001 and 2008.

According to the publication, in 2002, contractors providing services to BANCOOP issued false invoices for BANCOOP. The directors of the contracting companies would then receive checks as payment for nonexistent services, and transferred the money to an employee in the Hélio Malheiro, who would then deposit this money at a branch of a major bank. During this time, the organization's president, Luiz Malheiro, gave the money to the union chair, João Vaccari Neto. The embezzled money was used to promote the slush fund for Lula's campaign in 2002.

In his statement made to the Public Ministry, the engineer responsible for the works of BANCOOP, Ricardo Luiz do Carmo, stated that he went to the union headquarters where he was instructed to collect money from contractors, who provided services for BANCOOP, for the Workers Party campaign PT in 2002.

In one of the cases, a business called Mirante / Mizu Artifacts provided concrete blocks to its sole customer, BANCOOP. In the first three months of operation, the company received R$900 million. Among the leaders of Mirante / Mizu included four directors of BANCOOP, including the then-president of the cooperative Luiz Malheiros. Luiz authorized deposits in the company's account, which had an account at the same branch as the cooperative. The prosecutors suspected that the cooperative used a network of companies contracted to supply the slush funds of the Workers Party in the 2002 election and for the enrichment of the cooperative leaders. Mirante / Mizu is one such company. In only the first five months of its existence, Mizu received more than R$1 million from BANCOOP. Some of the suspicious activities included R$432,000 in donations to the Workers Party, R$162,000 in the purchasing of apartments for BANCOOP, R$153,000 in profit-sharing, and R$27,000 injected into an NGO owned by Malheiros. In his testimony Ricardo Luiz Carmo claims to have seen an invoice in the amount of R$500,000 to Mizu for consultant work on a civil construction project. This fact surprised Ricardo because the contractors actually received much less.

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Wikipedia