Brazil presidential hopeful Flavio Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing

Flavio Bolsonaro denied any wrongdoing on Wednesday in his reported request for millions from jailed banker Daniel Vorcaro, a revelation that could harm the lawmaker’s expected run for the country’s presidency in October against Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Earlier, The Intercept Brazil published voice messages of Bolsonaro asking Vorcaro, who is at the centre of a major corruption scandal, for 61 million reais (USD 12 million) to produce “The Dark Horse,” a movie that Sen Bolsonaro says he is making on the life of his father, jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro. The website said the senator asked for more after the initial amount was paid.

Vorcaro, the former CEO of the shuttered Banco Master who lived a lavish lifestyle before he was jailed, is the centre of a fraud and graft scandal that has engulfed several high-ranking officials in Brazil since the beginning of the year.

He is accused, among other things, of defrauding many of Banco Master’s 800,000 clients, including several state government pension funds, out of hundreds of millions of dollars by convincing them to make shady investments.

Brazil’s federal police estimates the bank’s total fraud at approximately 12 billion reais (USD 2.3 billion). The case remains under investigation by the country’s federal police and Supreme Court. Sen Bolsonaro, however, defended his request.

“Our case is of a son seeking PRIVATE sponsorship for a PRIVATE film about his father’s story. No public money,” Flavio Bolsonaro said in a statement. “I did not offer any (illegal) advantages in exchange. I did not have private encounters. I did not intermediate business with the government. I did not receive money.”

Hours before his messages to the banker became public, Sen Bolsonaro told journalists in Brasilia he had no association with Vorcaro. He did the same in March after Brazilian media reported that his number had been found in one of Vorcaro’s cell phones seized by federal police.

In a voice message sent to Vorcaro in September, Sen Bolsonaro says he was not comfortable asking for the banker’s money, but “the movie is in a very decisive moment.”

“There’s many payments that are late, everyone is tense and I am here worried about getting the opposite effect of that we dreamed for this movie,” Sen. Bolsonaro told Vorcaro. The lawmaker has publicly said he intended to have the movie out in the final stretch of the presidential campaign.