TC offers BRL 500,000 per proof on video authorship; understand

Target of a defamatory video with no known author, the investor services company TC (Traders Club) announced a reward of BRL 500,000 to the first person able to provide information leading to those responsible for the piece.

Published on Monday (22) in a statement to the market and on the Twitter account of the president of the TC, Pedro Albuquerque, the offer has among the rules published on the company’s website the requirement that any denunciation can be proven by suitable means.

The reward, as unusual as the audiovisual production that motivated the offer, has legal support, although it is not provided for in the country’s capital market regulation, they told Sheet lawyers familiar with the subject.

Distributed in WhatsApp groups on June 28, the video shows a woman with clown makeup saying that the TC manipulates shares traded on the Stock Exchange.

Without presenting evidence, she also talks about alleged cases of harassment and asks if it’s true that there was a gang rape of a former employee inside the company’s headquarters. The TC claims the insinuations are lies.

There is in article 854 of the Civil Code the legal provision for the promise of reward or gratuity for the performance of a service with previously established conditions. The same rule imposes the obligation to fulfill the promise.

“The Civil Code provides for the prize or reward, which makes the offer made by the company [TC] absolutely legal”, says lawyer Carlos Eduardo Machado, vice president of the IAB (Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros).

Machado also says that the offer of an advantage to perform a lawful task is regularly applied by the official whistleblower services.

The São Paulo Public Security Secretariat, for example, has a rewards program that pays up to R$50,000 for anonymous information that helps the police find criminals and fugitives from justice.

For the lawyer, even the exposure of the presenter’s image in the announcement of the reward is irregular, since the woman made up as a clown participated in an activity that can be considered illegal. “A person does not record a video defaming a company without knowing what he is doing”, commented Machado.

However, the CVM (Securities and Exchange Commission) rules do not provide for an official reward for anyone who helps to solve crimes against the capital market, according to Isac Costa, a graduate professor in law at Ibmec-SP and former CVM analyst.

Costa states that, although the solution of infractions with the help of the figure of the “whistleblower” (whistleblower or whistle blower) is common in the United States market, there are no public discussions in Brazil about the regulation of a rewards program within the scope of CVM.

In 2018, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal regulator of the American market) announced its biggest award, of US$ 83 million (R$ 424 million).

The case involved allegations of misuse of client funds that forced Merrill Lynch to pay $415 million in a settlement with the SEC.

In Brazil, even the private offer of gratification, such as the one made by the TC, is unprecedented, according to the professor.

“I’ve followed the capital market since the early 2000s, in addition to studying the sector, and I’m not aware that something like this has ever happened,” he said.

A person who works in a strategic position at the CVM also told the report that he had never followed a case of a reward offer along the lines of the one offered by the TC.

The CVM informed that it does not comment on specific cases under investigation.

TC says it seeks evidence to reach everyone involved

The president of the TC, Pedro Albuquerque, publicly accuses his competitor Empiricus of being the author of the apocryphal video.

Albuquerque claims that, among the elements that led him to make the accusation, are alleged exchanges of messages by WhatsApp of the directors of Empiricus. The files, he said, arrived anonymously at TC through its investor relations channel.

Empiricus, which denies having any relation to the play and says it intends to use a technical opinion to prove in court that the documents made public by Albuquerque are false.

THE Sheet questioned the TC about the reason for offering a reward for the solution of a case whose evidence the company already claims to have in hand.

In a note, the TC stated that it fully maintains its conviction in relation to the authorship of the crime.

“The reward will be important to prove the participation of all the other people involved, from the recording to the shooting of the video, in this unprecedented manipulation in the Brazilian capital market”, says the note.

The TC also claimed to have sent BTG bank, Empiricus’ controller, and “to the competent authorities a set of reports and notarial minutes that would prove the authorship of the apocryphal video that caused damage to the company”. THE Sheet did not have access to these new documents.

Within a month after the video was released, Traders Club lost about 45% of its market value, which represented a loss of approximately R$1 billion.

A person who follows the discussions at the TC summit told the report that the company is convinced that the compensation to be imposed by the Court on Empiricus will be significantly higher than the BRL 500,000 offered to the whistleblower.

Sought again to comment on the compensation, BTG and Empiricus did not comment.