Americanas: pressure mounts for CPI to summon billionaires – 06/14/2023 – Market

The revelations of the CEO of Americanas, Leonardo Coelho Pereira, increased the pressure for the CPI of the Chamber of Deputies that investigates the fraud in the company to summon the trio of reference shareholders of the company – the entrepreneurs Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira – and representatives from KPMG and PwC audits.

The summons are foreseen in the work plan of the CPI das Americanas and there are already requirements that deal with it. An administrative session will be held by the committee members this Wednesday afternoon (14) to define the next steps.

The meeting should review which call requests have already been approved to see who the next deponents will be.

“There are requests to hear auditors, banks, shareholders, and especially the former directors who so far are pointed out as guilty, without value judgment on my part”, said the rapporteur of the CPI, deputy Carlos Chiodini (MDB-SC) .

“Today we are going to see what the application has already been approved and we are going to make the agenda for next week”, he added.

Applications have already been approved to summon representatives of the audits and also former directors of the Americanas. Names of these two groups can testify as of next week, but the hammer with the dates will be hit this Wednesday afternoon.

In testimony this Tuesday (13) to the CPI, Pereira presented evidence that the two auditors communicated with the directors of Americanas to soften terms in their report and make it difficult for external observers to discover fraud.

Pereira pondered that it would be necessary to delve deeper into the issue to understand whether or not there was collusion between the audits and the Americanas, but classified the dialogues as a “point of attention”.

Wanted on Tuesday (13) by SheetKPMG in Brazil said that, “for reasons of secrecy clauses and rules of the profession, it is prevented from expressing itself on cases involving clients or former clients of the firm”.

PwC said in a note that “it does not comment on client issues due to confidentiality and professional secrecy rules”.

Regarding the trio of reference shareholders, the company’s CEO said that nothing indicates so far that they were aware of what was happening in Americanas.

The parliamentary members of the CPI were not convinced by Pereira’s words and expressed their willingness to summon the companies’ shareholders.

Their participation, however, should take longer, since before that it is necessary to approve an application calling them to testify at the CPI, which has not yet happened.

A report presented by Americanas on Tuesday morning before the company’s CEO’s testimony at the CPI treated the case as fraud for the first time. Before that, the term used was accounting inconsistency.

According to Pereira, there was a fraud in the company’s results, with the former directors using accounting mechanisms to create artificial profits in the company. Fraud can be close to BRL 50 billion.