Judge Ricardo Negrão, of the 2nd Reserved Chamber of Business Law of the Justice of São Paulo, denied this Thursday (2) an appeal by Americanas against a decision that allowed inspection of the computers of its executives in search of evidence against accounting fraud.
On Wednesday (1), the company had already had an appeal denied by the lower court judge who authorized the searches. She determined that the inspection be carried out by the company Kroll and that the information be shared with the CVM (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários).
The lawsuit was filed by Bradesco, which has BRL 4.7 billion in receivables from Americanas and claims that the company “was the stage for one of the biggest accounting frauds by the private sector”.
On appeal to the second instance, Americanas alleges that there is no evidence of fraud, that the case is being investigated by competent bodies, that it has created an independent commission of investigation and that there are other actions requesting investigation into its computers.
It also repeats that the inspection of emails generates a risk of leaking information about third parties unrelated to the case. By denying the first appeal, Judge Andréa Galhardo Palma decreed secrecy on the material collected on the computers
In this Thursday’s decision, Negrão argued that it is not possible to guarantee that Americanas will be able to prevent “the agents involved from compromising the evidence that potentially provides the answers” pursued by the bank.
“On the redundancies raised regarding the procedures in progress with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, I believe that the scope of action of these bodies will direct their efforts to gathering information that may be different from that of interest to the Plaintiff, prevailing its interest in the production of proof”, continues the text.
Regarding the risk to the privacy of executives, the judge states that the lower court decision “already adopted the necessary precautions for the protection of sensitive data, also not seeing, from this perspective, elements of plausibility that support the preliminary reform”.
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