A new pizza for Americanas – 09/09/2023 – Elio Gaspari

The Americanas retail chain has three types of pizzas for sale. Its flavors are: pepperoni, four cheeses and chicken with catupiry. They cost between R$16.99 and R$18.99. Since last week, when the CPI scandal ended its activities without identifying a single person responsible for the ruin, Americanas could well offer the CPI Pizza, without anything, just the cardboard box.

The fraud committed at Americanas resulted in a request for judicial recovery with a declared debt of R$43 billion with banks and around 15 thousand suppliers, with losses for at least 146 thousand individual shareholders. It is by far the biggest corporate crash ever to occur in Pindorama and the CPI ended up in nothing.

Tancredo Neves always taught: “Cleverness, when it’s too much, eats the owner”.

The CPI was heading towards its sad outcome, when a surprise came: the former CEO of Americanas Miguel Gutierrez sent him a letter in which he said that “I became a convenient ‘scapegoat’ to be sacrificed in the name of protecting notorious and powerful figures of Brazilian capitalism”.

Fulanizing, the three major shareholders of Americanas are: Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira. In the latest Forbes magazine list they were placed as the 3rd, 4th and 5th richest people in Brazil. Together, they total US$34.3 billion. According to Gutierrez, shareholders knew about the company’s bad situation and Sicupira monitored its sales. There is no record of what they knew about the fraud.

Gutierrez is in Spain and it is likely that he will not leave. He did not testify at the CPI and in his letter he repeats that he was not aware of the fraud. In the case of Americanas, nobody knew anything. The doctor knew that in 2022 the company was going badly and saw nothing unusual, but he transferred ownership of three properties to family members and in at least one exchange of messages he left secret figures of the difficulties. During the second half of 2022, the company’s directors sold 14.1 million shares, worth R$241.1 million, of which R$150 million would have been negotiated by Gutierrez.

Pizza CPI assumes that the audience pays for the dough and eats the cardboard. There are ongoing investigations, including whistle-blowers, and Gutierrez’s letter sparked a wake-up call. It is hard to believe that a R$ 43 billion hole is the work of a single goat. This is a herd thing.

Directors of Americanas mocked the CPI and, when they appeared, they were silent. One of them refused to confirm the authorship of a message in which he said that talking about the company’s debt would be “sudden death”.

The American capital market is robust because every now and then a scandal breaks out and some scumbags go to jail. So far, the case of the Americanas shows the predominance of arrogance. Suppliers lost money, shareholders lost their savings, and nobody knew anything.

Gradually, it seems that Gutierrez would know everything. He knew a lot more than he says he does, but a lot of people inside and outside the company knew something.

On a skewer worth R$ 43 billion there are too many horns for a single goat.

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