PGR cites suspicion against Ramagem at Abin under Bolsonaro – 01/03/2024 – Power

The PGR (Attorney General’s Office) cites the suspicion that Alexandre Ramagem, director of Abin (Brazilian Intelligence Agency) in the government of Jair Bolsonaro and considered to run for Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, corrupted himself to avoid the disclosure of information about the irregular use of spy software during his management.

Information about the activities of Ramagem, a personal friend of the Bolsonaro family, was used by investigators to launch Operation Last Mile, on October 20, when the Federal Police arrested agency officials and employees were removed. All are suspected of participating in the purchase and use of First Mile, software capable of monitoring the geolocation of cell phones.

Ramagem, currently a federal deputy for PL, was not the target of the action, but is mentioned in the inquiry reported by minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the STF (Supreme Federal Court).

Wanted by SheetRamagem stated, through his advisor, that he “represented the Federal Police” to obtain information on the issues covered in the report.

The use of First Mile became public after the newspaper O Globo revealed that two Abin employees involved in alleged bidding fraud in the Army cited the agency’s use of the tool in the process in which they would be fired.

The two employees were arrested in the PF operation and fired on the same day. They are suspected of coercion by using knowledge about the use of spy software to avoid dismissal in an internal disciplinary process.

The duo was being investigated internally for participating in an Army tender using a company in the name of relatives.

Eduardo Izycki and Rodrigo Colli, says the PGR, “aware of the misuse of the First Mile system for purposes unrelated to Abin’s institutional mission, they provoked the former general director, Alexandre Ramagem, to delay the judgment of PAD 03/2019”.

The former director, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, had converted the trial into an investigation, with the appointment of a new processing committee, and failed to submit the conclusions of the first committee to the Minister of the Institutional Security Office, responsible for assessing and deciding on these cases.

“There is evidence of concussion and active corruption by Eduardo Izycki and Rodrigo Colli and passive corruption by the former general director of Abin Alexandre Ramagem”, says the PGR.

Lawyer Rafael Adamek, who works in the defense of Izycki and Colli, stated that the investigations are being carried out under secrecy and, as a result, he would not comment on the case.

Minister Alexandre de Moraes, when accepting the PF’s request for arrest, links the need for the measure to the search for evidence about “which elements are in their possession (Izycky and Colli) to the point of making former director Alexandre Ramagem carry out administrative acts outside of its competence in defending them”.

Regarding the purchase and use of the software, the PF says that Ramagem is among those responsible for the actions and omissions and is part of the “senior management core”, made up of federal police officers in advisory and management positions at Abin during the Bolsonaro government.

“The potential awareness and participation of those then responsible for managing Abin gains importance when, in extemporaneous action after exhausting the use of the tool, they build a ‘correctional’ administrative process to guarantee the ‘a posteriori legality’ of their actions”, says the PF .

The suspicion is that all the irregularities carried out since the purchase, still under Michel Temer’s government, in 2018, through the use and attempts to avoid internal investigation resulted in the monitoring of several people unrelated to Abin’s work between 2019 and 2021.

For the PF, the facts discovered point to the “misappropriation of Abin by senior managers, most of them federal police officers, with the aim of reducing the apex body of the Brazilian intelligence system to an instrument for illicit purposes”.

The PF states that from the beginning Abin knew about the invasive nature of the software and its ability to invade the national telephone network.

For the researchers, in the commercial proposal, the selling company reported the use of the tool “telephony structure abroad (SS7) to simulate calls in roaming, including using SMS Spoofing, resulting in the manipulation of network signals telephony”.

“The Brazilian State, therefore, paid R$5 million to a foreign company to carry out systematic attacks on the national telephone network to sell sensitive personal data that resulted in the geolocation of several Brazilian citizens being made available without any legal order”, states the PF .

Among the targets, the PF names teachers, lawyers, politicians and others, without detailing the identity of each one.

In October, Abin stated that the tool stopped being used in May 2021, and that it has been collaborating with the PF and STF since the beginning of the investigations. The PF also decided to investigate the Army after the Sheet showed that the institution had purchased the system.