Americanas treat the process in the dark, says BV to Justice – 02/03/2023 – Market

Banco Votorantim stated to the Justice of Rio de Janeiro that Americanas treats its judicial recovery process “as if it were its own accounting: in the dark.”

In a petition sent this Friday (3) to the 4th Business Court of Rio, the financial institution also stated that the retail group made an illegal maneuver in the course of the process and seeks to escape the contradictory.

BV is a creditor of BRL 3.3 billion to the business group that filed for bankruptcy in January after making public a billionaire tax scandal.

The request presented to Justice deals with the opening of specific incidents to discuss the raising of values. Incidents are a type of process parallel to that of judicial recovery, but linked to the main one.

According to BV’s lawyers, the trustee asked in the process that the discussions of amounts be done separately.

The request was accepted, under the condition that Americanas should initiate the incidents and that the procedure should include the creditors (“observing the contradictory”, says the decision). They would also be accompanied by the Public Ministry.

BV’s defense states that, although there is an indication, in the process, that Americanas had already complied with the judicial administrator’s guidance, “it is not aware of this compliance.”

Lawyers also write in the petition that they cannot locate any incidents in the process system.

“It is not the first time, in this process, that the companies under reorganization seek to escape the contradictory. Because they have already been successful in the immoral maneuver practiced in the two previous opportunities, the companies under reorganization
repeated now, with regard to the incident”, say the BV lawyers.

“If the companies under reorganization present such fragile allegations to the point of not being able to withstand the contradictory, this does not give them the right to simply hide behind the secrecy of justice.”

In another part of the petition, Votorantim says that secrecy is “absolutely incompatible” with the transparency needed to solve “a case as confusing (to say the least) as the present one”.

The bank requests that Justice not decide on the amounts deposited in the file without all interested parties being heard. Ten lawyers from Gustavo Tepedino and Arruda Alvim & Thereza Alvim sign the petition.

In the opinion of lawyer Gabriel de Britto Silva, legal director of Ibraci (Brazilian Institute of Citizenship), who filed a lawsuit asking for compensation from Americanas investors, the request is plausible given the number of creditors involved. Any secrecy, he asserts, cannot be acceptable.

BV, like BTG, also went to the STJ (Superior Court of Justice) to question the competence of the Justice of Rio de Janeiro to decide on disputes between the bank and the retail chain. Both had decisions favorable to the execution of their credits in the Justice of São Paulo, while the guardianship requested by Americanas to prevent collections is running in Rio.

In the case of BTG, Justice Og Fernandes, acting as president of the STJ, maintained the blocking of appeals that had been executed by BTG while the merits of the competence for judgment are not analyzed in the Second Section of the STJ.

This Friday (3), Americanas asked for reconsideration of the injunction decision of the acting president, but there was no decision until the publication of this text.

BV’s injunction was denied on January 30, also by Minister Og Fernandes, who considered the situations of the two banks to be different because, in the case of BTG, the courts gave conflicting decisions, while for Votorantim the two decisions denied their requests .