Former Revenue chief pressured servers for jewelry in WhatsApp audios and messages

The former head of the Federal Revenue of the Bolsonaro government, Julio Cesar Vieira Gomes, put pressure on public servants to release the jewels seized at the customs office in Guarulhos, in São Paulo. For this, Gomes used unofficial acts during his command at the organ.

O Estadão found that, in order to recover the jewels estimated at BRL 16.5 million and send them to then-president Jair Bolsonaro and first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, Gomes pressured servers from various departments, through text messages sent by applications such as WhatsApp, audios, phone calls and emails about it. The offensive also reached undersecretaries of the agency.

In one of the audios to which the Estadão had access, Gomes asks an employee to access another Revenue department – ​​the General Coordination of Programming and Logistics (Copol) – and pass his contact to the person responsible for the area, under the argument that he needs to explain the case of withholding and that it is an item that “is part of the personal cabinet” of the Presidency of the Republic. “There is a personal cabinet, it is an organ that he created”, he says.

At the time, Gomes was trying to circumvent the first denial of his attempt to release the diamonds given by the Saudi regime. In the audio message, he states: “I called you now, no need to get back to me, no. But pass my phone, please, to… Well, I know his last name is (Gomes says the server’s last name), that he is from Copol, and that he passed the information there to (Gomes mentions the name of the delegate from Revenue), from São Paulo, saying that it has to be the Secretary of Administration of the Presidency to sign the letter in case of donation. I need to explain to him that this is not it. Which is something else”, says Gomes.

He continues in the message: “It is another body, another unit separate from the Presidency of the Republic as a whole. It is another body called historical and personal collection. It is part of the personal office of the Presidency of the Republic. It’s an organ in there that he created. There is a decree, which he created. And the person responsible for that is the one who signed the official letter. I’m going to send the decree”.

collection

Gomes makes reference in the message to a decree published 21 years ago – and argues that his request to recover the jewels is based on this text. This is Decree 4344, of August 26, 2002, which deals with rules on “preservation, organization and protection of the private document collections of the Presidents of the Republic”.

According to Revenue officials, however, Gomes adopted a mistaken interpretation of the rules to try to convince officials to release the diamonds and, therefore, committed an irregular act. According to this “understanding” mentioned by the then Revenue Secretary, gifts received by agents should only be incorporated into public assets if they were given in a gift exchange ceremony. “The documents that constitute the private presidential collection are, in their origin, property of the President of the Republic, including for the purpose of inheritance, donation or sale”, states the law.

In 2016, however, the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) prohibited this type of interpretation by filling a legal gap and establishing that former presidents can only keep “items for personal use or of a very personal nature”. The body even determined the return of 434 gifts received by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and 117 data for Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016).

O Estadão found that Copol, after being provoked by the former secretary, responded to the head of Revenue, through a formal letter, denying the delivery of the jewelry set.

Application

On another front, Gomes sent documents via WhatsApp and used the tool to give orders and guide employees. In the opinion of the servers, it was a calculated act to avoid leaving their fingerprints on official systems.

In addition to the message sent in audio to the head of his office, a type of attitude that escapes the internal rite of the Revenue, the former secretary fired several messages to different servers in the months leading up to the end of Bolsonaro’s mandate, in an attempt to withdraw the gift given by Saudi Arabia from the Treasury coffers, in Guarulhos.

As revealed the Estadão, his final act, after resorting to all these pressures, took place on December 29 of last year, when he called Navy First Sergeant Jairo Moreira da Silva, who had just landed at Guarulhos airport. At the behest of Bolsonaro’s personal office, the military traveled to São Paulo to try to take the jewels.

On the night of that Thursday, the 2nd, Gomes called the first sergeant and tried to intercede in favor of the Bolsonaro government. In yet another offensive, he tried to convince the tax auditor who was at the airport to release the case with the diamond jewelry, without success.

Paris

On December 30, 2022, one day before Bolsonaro’s term ended, he was nominated by the still-president to take a position at the Brazilian embassy in Paris, but the Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, reversed the appointment at the beginning of the Lula government. .

In a note, Gomes stated that when he contacted Bolsonaro’s emissary by telephone on December 29 at the Guarulhos airport, his objective was not to authorize the release of the items, but to inform the military about the situation in which the seized goods were found.

“Regarding the telephone conversation on December 29th, I only informed the designated server that the incorporation of the items was still under analysis and, therefore, would not take place on that date”, he said.

* With information from the newspaper The State of S. Paulo.

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