Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Americanas pedaling hid a red elephant on the swing

After a week of scandal over Americanas, all that is known is that someone disguised the balance sheets for at least five years (the period was estimated, so to speak, by the former president of the company, Sérgio Rial). The rest is gossip, speculation and euphemistic mockery.

Almost nothing is known about the accounting mumunha (where they hid the red elephant in the balance sheet), who commanded the trick, who knew about the roll, what the weight of the pachyderm was, why people from the company decided to hide accounting losses for years or if the fictitious accounting results fattened someone’s pay (or by how much).

Calling all this “accounting inconsistency” is, in addition to illiteracy, camouflaging a thick roll (“inconsistent” is a crude anglicism, like so many that infest the language, because of the illiterate “translate”: it means inconsistency, incompatibility or even thick cascade ).

The company, it seems and in simple summary, borrowed from banks in order to pay suppliers of goods, but preferred, so to speak, not to count the size of the pirate parrot. The total size of the camouflage is not yet known, according to Rial.

The company’s directors therefore cheated the very measure of its credit quality, to say the least. They deceived shareholders, banks and suppliers, among other interested parties (such as those who believe in the operation and supervision of the market). If what Rial reported happened, it’s fraud, unless someone imagines that the intern messed up the Excel spreadsheet.

Think about it: this type of pedaling would cause the biggest scandal if, by hypothesis, it happened in a PT government, right? They could even overthrow the president. Imagine. In the case of “the market”, it is “inconsistency”.

Even pedaling and singing, Americanas supposedly made its payments to banks (who would otherwise scream, right?). If he had such debts, he had supposedly sold or had in stock (minimum) the goods he financed. This judging by the scarce explanations released. In theory, supposedly, money came in and went out. Americanas said the roll would have “no material impact”.

But the company was in the accounting red. Somehow, I was pedaling, who knows on whose initiative, connivance, malice or omission (several executives, because you don’t do a pirouette like that without the collaboration of a lot of people).

To use a euphemism, Americanas has more debts than it declared, it probably paid more interest than it counted and its profit “on the books” was smaller than it officially said in public.

To use the language of some creditors, such as Banco BTG Pactual, it is an “accounting mess” and the “biggest corporate fraud in the history of the country”. For the Brazilian Association of Investors, it was “billionaire fraud”.

The banks certainly saw Americanas’ debt grow a lot. It should not have known how much credit its peers had granted (Santander, Bradesco, Safra, Itaú, Banco do Brasil and BTG Pactual) and not one of them must have been so much more exposed than the others. Obviously not the fault of the (potential) default victims, but no one smelled burning?

The company must go into judicial recovery. It will default, in part, at least. Assuming that the dead parrot (accounting write-off for the banks) is R$ 20 billion and excluding the 45% tax deduction, we have a hole of about R$ 10 billion. It won’t break anyone, but it will break shins, scare off suppliers, mess up working capital credit and the like, discredit the stock market, and, laugh, laugh, laugh, audit firms.