In three years of management, the president of Caixa Econômica Federal, Pedro Guimarães, transformed the bank into a machine for promoting “good news” for the government at the same speed with which he collected accusations of sexual harassment and disagreements at the helm of the institution.
Since taking office in January 2019, Guimarães has implemented a reformist agenda and never tired of criticizing the PT administration, which, according to him, led the bank to dubious deals marked by corruption and losses.
He came to collect disaffection with Funcef, the billionaire pension fund of the bank’s employees, for changing the institution’s governance to promote “a cleaning”, as he said internally, without fearing the risk of suffering lawsuits and lawsuits with control bodies. .
In the first year, it sold BRL 15.5 billion in Caixa assets, improving its balance sheet, which jumped to a profit of BRL 14.7 billion. Last year, he presented an even greater result (R$ 17.3 billion).
A good part of this performance is due to the sale of assets considered by Guimarães as “toxic”, which had nothing to do with the “nature of the bank”. Since then, he started to frame the measures adopted as “mathematical”.
“If they make sense for the bank, if they make a profit, they will be considered”, said Guimarães. “Cashier is the Excel bank [programa de computador usado para planilhar dados].”
He became close to Bolsonaro and the president’s family even before the election, according to reports from those who coordinated the campaign at the time.
Friends report that, while still a partner at Banco Plural, the last institution he went to before joining the government, Guimarães scheduled conversations with businessmen and financiers in Brazil and the US to introduce Bolsonaro, then presidential candidate.
Also according to reports, initially, Guimarães was considered to coordinate the Economy, then under the care of the current Minister of Mines and Energy, Adolfo Sachsida.
With the arrival of Paulo Guedes to the team, Guimarães began to focus on Caixa, interested in presenting a plan to transform the institution into a leading bank and prepare it for its IPO. His plan was, at that moment, to become president of the institution, which happened.
During the pandemic, the executive saw a business opportunity for Caixa and convinced Bolsonaro to centralize the payment of emergency aid in an application developed by Caixa. Initially, Banco do Brasil would also participate.
Subsequently, other benefits granted by the government during the pandemic were also paid through the Caixa app.
The success led Guimarães to ask the Central Bank for authorization to open a digital bank controlled by Caixa that, in the future, would have shares traded on the Stock Exchange.
The heart of this bank would be the low-income customers gathered by Caixa in the application. The executive believes it is possible to raise R$ 50 billion with this operation. The deal is still awaiting approval from the BC.
By centralizing the payment of government benefits, Caixa started to defend Bolsonaro, who faced criticism in the face of his denialist stance regarding the lethality of the coronavirus and the need for social isolation.
The government’s defense led Guimarães to convince BB to leave Febraban, the federation of banks, if the entity published a manifesto that, in short, criticized Bolsonaro’s attacks on the STF.
This ideological alignment with Bolsonaro brought him even closer to the president. Guimarães became a frequent figure in the president’s Thursday broadcasts.
In one of them, in which Bolsonaro talked about arming the population, Guimarães said he had 15 weapons and that he would kill if he had a daughter trapped in a van.
“If my daughter went to the van, I would either kill or die”, he said in the presidential live.
The comment came when commenting on the case of swimmer Luiz Lima, who was an Olympic athlete and had his wife and daughter, 14, arrested.
“What the fuck is this? Sorry. What the fuck is this? The guy goes to the van with his daughter. If it were me, I would take my 15 guns and give one. I would die. Because if my daughter went to the van, I would I would kill or be killed.”
Internally, Guimarães tried to imprint his management style on the servers. At the bank’s event at the end of last year, he forced bank executives to do push-ups and give stars, like Olympic gymnasts, during Nação Caixa, the bank’s annual event held in the interior of São Paulo.
The harassment was recorded by employees and the video, spread by members of the bank workers’ union and published by the Metrópoles portal.
In addition to the internal cleaning, as Guimarães usually defines his management, the executive started to promote weekly visits to the bank’s branches across the country.
In Caixa’s official accounts on social networks, publications highlighting the bank’s president’s performance are common, with images and texts of his statements, trips, appearances at bank branches and inspections of works, in addition to other unusual activities.
The bank has already published, for example, photos of the executive inside the garbage dump in Cuiabá and dirty with mud inside a mangrove in Bahia, accompanied by fishermen.
Among the dozens of trips, the president of Caixa also inaugurated infrastructure projects, participated in musical performances and visited companies. His idea, according to Planalto advisors, was to compete for the vice seat on the ticket with Bolsonaro.
The visits led by Guimarães are part of a project called Caixa Mais Brasil, similar to the slogan “more Brazil, less Brasília” used by Bolsonaro. More than 150 municipalities have already been visited.
Suspicions of sexual harassment at Caixa began in 2019. According to reports from employees interviewed on condition of anonymity, a security guard was even fired for having caught Guimarães in an “improper situation” with a bank employee in Caixa’s private parking lot, located in the basement of the bank. institution in Brasilia.
There are reports of other employees fired in other states for having witnessed situations of harassment practiced by the president of the bank.
The cases, however, do not come as a surprise to former co-workers of Pedro Guimarães who, according to them, have generated controversy.
These colleagues, who declined to be named, said the executive had been involved in other episodes of harassment in the past, which was the reason for his departure from banks such as Santander and even BTG Pactual.
In addition to “unusual beliefs and practices”, Pedro Guimarães came to be called by his market colleagues as “Pedro Maluco” — a nickname that was also adopted by government officials at the Planalto Palace.
Guimarães, 51, has been married for twenty years to Manuella, daughter of OAS contractor Leo Pinheiro, and has two children.
He always tried to distance himself from the figure of his father-in-law, arrested by the PF in Lava Jato and whose award-winning whistleblower was a decisive factor in the arrest of former president Lula — an episode that created conditions for Bolsonaro to come to power.
Manuella went to the ceremony for the presentation of the Safra Plan, at Caixa, this Wednesday (29) at a time when government officials already took Guimarães’ resignation for granted. Pedro Guimarães spoke and, at no time, mentioned the accusations against him.
At that moment, the name of Daniella Marques was already circulating as being quoted to replace him. She is special secretary at the Ministry of Economy.
For him to step down immediately, however, Guimarães must resign.
Otherwise, it will take an extraordinary meeting of the bank’s board of directors to decide on the dismissal, something that will require time causing wear and tear for Bolsonaro’s campaign, which is running for reelection.
Before diving into the financial market, Pedro tried a career as a swimmer, following in his father’s footsteps. He was awarded an award by Flamengo, in Rio de Janeiro, and competed as a university student in the 1990s. Afterwards, he took up swimming to keep fit and decided to play water polo.
His relationship with his father and with sports directed Caixa’s investments in advertising, in order to bring resources to athletes in training, changing the previous policy that, according to him, only allocated funds to top and famous teams.
At his inauguration ceremony, Guimarães mentioned his relationship with sport and was moved to speak of his father who, according to him, was infected with the AIDS virus.
Graduated in Economics from PUC in Rio de Janeiro, he received a doctorate from the University of Rochester, in New York (USA). In 2005, he became a partner at the bank BTG Pactual. In 2011, he left BTG and joined Banco Plural, from where he left to take over Caixa.
THE Sheet tried to contact Guimarães directly since Tuesday, but he did not respond.
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