The reflexes of the Federal Police’s action on eight Bolsonarista businessmen from the Whatsapp group who exchanged scammer messages can trigger compliance problems in their businesses.
According to experts, it is still too early to estimate this type of impact, but the noise generated can make it difficult, for example, for companies to negotiate with banks.
“As a rule, companies involved in Federal Police operations have compliance problems in all financial institutions, which can generate credit problems”, says criminalist Celso Sanchez Vilardi, from Vilardi Advogados.
Rogério Taffarello, partner at Mattos Filho, points out the association between the names of the companies and their businesses.
“Without going into the merits of a judicial decision whose foundations are not known, it is to be expected that corporate counterparties know how to separate issues of legal entities from those of the individuals who control them, even more so because of the electoral restrictions that fall on legal entities. However, this understanding does not always occur in practice, and in some cases the mere existence of journalistic news about an ongoing investigation ends up causing problems”, says Taffarello.
He also warns of internal measures of companies.
“There does not seem to be any legal reasons for companies to have more direct consequences if they do not engage in electoral propaganda. But in the context of the necessary separation between acts of individuals and legal entities, as a precaution, it is important that companies have mechanisms to prevent that shareholders ask, from politicians they want to support, favors that are in the company’s interest, just as shareholders are required to keep the interests of companies completely unrelated to their decisions to support politician A or B”, says Taffarello.
Pierpaolo Bottini also points out that it is difficult to assess for now. If they are just conversations, the decision will be seen as an exaggeration and, therefore, it will not serve as a reference for financial institutions to cut credit. But if there is evidence of some involvement of businesspeople in financial transactions or actual organization of a coup d’état, there may be an impact, depending on the extent of each one’s commitment.
Joana Cunha with Paulo Ricardo Martins and Diego Felix
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