SC respirator case involves former national team player

The entrepreneur who negotiated the sale of 200 respirators to the government of Santa Catarina for R $ 33 million in a fraudulent agreement, has contracts with the government of Pará and the municipalities of Santa Catarina and Goiás to provide food stamps to public school students during the pandemic from covid-19.

Fraud in Santa Catarina, denounced by an exclusive investigation of the Intercept, detonated a political crisis that brought down two of the main secretaries of the government of Carlos Moisés, of the PSL, a firefighter who was elected as a result of Bolsonarism, and makes the governor himself swing in office.

As in the case of respirators, food stamp contracts were closed in an emergency, that is, without tender, due to the new coronavirus crisis. Only in Pará, the agreement is expected to yield R $ 21.5 million in three months.

The businessman is Fabio Guasti, who the Santa Catarina authorities call “one of the main articulators of the criminal scheme” in the respirator business.

Guasti’s group is based in Guarulhos, São Paulo, includes businessmen and politicians from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and had direct participation from government officials from Santa Catarina. According to the research, they intended to use the money from the respirators to buy covid-19 rapid test kits and resell them to other states. It would be a way to launder money.

The group’s activities are not restricted to the south of the country. Meu Vale, which belongs to Guasti, signed a contract in April to supply food cards to the students of the public school in Pará for R $ 21.5 million. The agreement was made without bidding and will be valid for three months.

We asked MDB Governor Helder Barbalho’s office for a copy of the contract with Meu Vale and the names of the companies that also disputed the deal. The request was not granted. Instead, we received a note in which the Ministry of Education of Pará reports that the tender opened on April 3 had the participation of eight companies. Regarding Guasti’s participation in the scheme investigated in Santa Catarina, the Barbalho government simply stated “that the company [Meu Vale] it is not considered inappropriate and the prices are appropriate for the reality of the market ”. “Therefore,” he justified, “you cannot avoid competing in the offers.”

On April 28, Intercept revealed fraud in the contract for 200 lung ventilators. The seller is a company called Veigamed, based in Nilópolis, in Baixada Fluminense, which has no structure to fulfill a R $ 33 million contract.

The respirators were purchased for R $ 165 thousand each. On average, the equipment used to treat severe cases of covid-19 costs from R $ 60,000 to R $ 100,000 in other purchases made by governments. All 200 devices were supposed to be delivered in early April, but they haven’t arrived yet.

The report led to a series of investigations that brought together the Santa Catarina Police, Prosecutor’s Office and Court of Accounts and have already cost the secretaries of state Helton Zeferino of Health and Douglas Borba of the House Civil. In addition, three impeachment petitions against Moses filed with the Santa Catarina Legislative Assembly cite the respirator scandal.

For the MP, there are indications of speculative crime, active and passive corruption, and possibly money laundering. A parliamentary committee of inquiry was created to review the purchase of respirators. The Prosecutor’s Office even requested the cancellation of the acquisition and is also investigating the case.

More business without bidding

On March 24, the city of Florianópolis announced a contract with Meu Vale for the same service promised to Pará. Former player André Santos, who played for Corinthians, Flamengo and the Brazilian team, served as a poster. Despite the publication in the Official Gazette that describes the agreement, without tender, as “without costs to the municipality”, the transparency portal points to transfers to Meu Vale of R $ 400 thousand in less than two months.

On Monday 11, after highlighting that Meu Vale belongs to suspects in the fraudulent respirator business, the prefecture led by DEM’s Gean Loureiro took a step back and sent the news that he broke the contract with Meu Vale due to involvement. of the company in “alleged irregularities”.

The city of Florianópolis also did not provide a copy of the contract or details about Meu Vale’s work. In a note, the municipality once again stated that the provision of the service contracted by exemption from bidding will have no administration costs. The municipality also says that it did not make payments for Meu Vale to operate the service and that the R $ 398.3 thousand committed and reported in the Transparency Portal would refer to credits destined for beneficiaries.

“Meu Vale’s counterparty is given through the percentage of each purchase made,” the city said in the note. Prior to this contract, Meu Vale had already been operating the municipal employee benefits card, a service that was not canceled.

André Santos admitted to us, by phone, that he was a friend of Guasti’s. He also said that he was presented to Meu Vale by his friend Gilliard Gerent, one of the suspects investigated by the Santa Catarina authorities for the purchase of respirators and appointed by witnesses as Veigamed’s representative at a meeting held on April 4, shortly after the payment of R $ 33 million, at the SC Civil Defense headquarters. The former player confirmed that he acted as a kind of business card for Guasti’s company, mediating negotiations for the card’s accession in the cities of Blumenau and Tubarão, administered respectively by Mario Hildebrandt, Pode and Joares Ponticelli, PP.

Despite this, Santos assured that he does not know if his friend Guasti participated in the sale of respirators to the Santa Catarina government. “Our call was only for the benefits card. I did not know about respirators and none of this was done through Meu Vale, “he guaranteed. “Since I have contacts with municipalities and many people, I make the connections. That is what I did with the lunch card here in Santa Catarina. I knew the secretary, I know mayors, ”said the former player, who was raised and lives in Florianópolis.

With the Goiana Federation of Municipalities, Meu Vale also announced in March an agreement to provide food cards to interested municipalities. Campos Verdes Mayor Haroldo Naves of the MDB, also president of the federation, used the pandemic to encourage the use of the service. But, after being contacted by the report, the entity removed the news announcing the association with Meu Vale, and did not respond to questions about the contract.

Company on behalf of Orange

Executive director of Meu Vale and six other companies, Fabio Guasti is a doctor and lives in Guarulhos. Its businesses span São Paulo, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina.

In addition to the benefit card service, Guasti has a company that rents ambulances for the public and private sectors, called Remocenter, which announces itself as “the leading provider of emergency medical services in the country’s public sector.” Despite appearing as company director and appearing in lawsuits as legal guardian, Guasti is not in Remocenter’s corporate structure. The emergency transport service is part of the range of “benefits” offered on Meu Vale cards. Still in Guarulhos, Guasti built and manages a shopping center.

Officially, the doctor does not own Veigamed either. But the testimonies of witnesses included in the investigation point to it as a link between corrupters and politicians in Santa Catarina and Rio de Janeiro in the case of respirators.

We looked for Guasti last Friday, May 8. By phone, he told us that he was not involved with Veigamed and that he did not even know about the purchase of 200 respirators by the Santa Catarina government.

“I don’t know the company and I have no connection to that. I don’t know why they are quoting my name, ”said Guasti, before hanging up without giving time for more questions. The next day, he was one of 35 targets for search and capture orders from the operation investigating the case.

Guasti was directly responsible for Veigamed’s arrival in Santa Catarina. Accountant Leandro Alair de Liz, who has an office in Biguaçu, municipality of the Gran Florianópolis, explained to us by phone that he was hired to open the Meu Vale branch in Florianópolis in September 2019.

Months later, in April 2020, he said he was approached by “a representative, a Meu Vale employee” to do the same type of service for Veigamed. The accountant declined to reveal the employee’s name, saying he never spoke directly to Guasti and that he has documents for the services provided. Liz also told us that after seeing articles in the press relating the company to the respirator scandal, she ended the service without completing the creation of the Santa Catarina branch. But now Veigamed herself acknowledges that Guasti acted on his behalf in Santa Catarina.

In the proposal to sell respirators as a manager at Veigamed, Pedro Nascimento Araújo stated, even in April, that he did not know Guasti. At the time, contacted by phone, he suggested that he be a “government consultant.” In a new request for a response, on Tuesday 12, Veigamed admitted the role of Guasti in the purchase of respirators. In a note, the company referred to him as a “renowned doctor,” hired “occasionally in this business with his professional experience through consulting.” Still in response, the company promised that it will deliver the respirators.

In the IRS, Veigamed appears as the property of Rosemary Neves de Araújo. Probably an orange: according to a report by the Santa Catarina Court of Accounts published in late April, she is a former bus driver who “does not have the profile” to own a company with an reported capital of R $ 1.6 million . Despite this, she appears as a partner of Pedro Nascimento Araújo, director of Veigamed, in another business consulting company.

A help from the secretary

Investigations by the Santa Catarina authorities reinforce the suspicion that Guasti acted as Veigamed’s representative in the sale of respirators. According to the survey, the then secretary of the Civil House, Douglas Borba, appointed him to the purchasing department of the Ministry of Health. Borba’s trusted advisor, Leandro Adriano de Barros, supervised the negotiation.

Borba and Barros have a long personal and political relationship, according to the investigation. In March of this year, a company to which Barros provides “legal advice” won the tender without bidding for the construction of a field hospital in Itajaí, one of the main cities in the state, for R $ 76.9 million. However, the project ended suspended after the Court of Auditors indicated favoritism.

Investigators already know that the day before the public notice for the purchase of respirators was published, on March 25, Guasti received a copy of a proposal for the sale of respirators, sent by a businessman named Rafael Wekerlin of Santa Catarina Brazilian International Business.

Wekerlin told police that he was approached by an “intermediary” interested in selling respirators to the government, who also told him to forward the proposal to Guasti in copy. A WhatsApp group was even created to resolve the details of the negotiation.

According to the businessman, he told investigators, Veigamed would guarantee the purchase by the Santa Catarina government and he would be in charge of the international area of ​​business, such as customs clearance and contact with Chinese suppliers. Wekerlin said he left the business after realizing that the broker, whom he did not name, and the other participants linked to Veigamed were negotiating a R $ 3 million bribe.

The proposal prepared by him, with international appointments and details of the equipment and the supplier, was never presented. In Guasti’s hands, the document gained other names and ended up being included in the dispute because it was Veigamed’s. In fact, it was the only proposal officially presented in the government’s process management system until the then Secretary of Health, Helton Zeferino, hit the hammer and closed the purchase in just five hours.

After the deal was closed, other proposals with strong indications of fraud entered the process, likely to legitimize Veigamed’s offer. One of the companies that offered proposals, JE Comercio, is a ghost, it doesn’t even have a CNPJ.

Councilman lobbyist

The report released by Intercept on April 28 also took police to the home of the mayor of São João de Meriti, in the interior of Rio. Davi Perini Vermelho, from PSD, is better known in the city as Didê. On May 9, investigators confiscated R $ 300,000 in cash from his home. Days before, in early April, Didê had contacted a company in Joinville, presenting himself as Veigamed’s representative, to formalize the purchase of 110 thousand kits to test covid-19 for R $ 11.1 million.

The purchase, according to the police investigation, would be a way for Veigamed “to pulverize the resources coming from the state, taking money from it and making it difficult to reimburse the public purse, a clear possibility of money laundering.”

Didê requested that the kits be delivered to a shed in Vargem Pequena, a neighborhood on the west side of Rio de Janeiro, which was also the subject of police searches. The delivery of the kits in Rio indicates that the group’s objective was to sell the material outside of Santa Catarina. The contracted company did not deliver the kits in Rio and deposited the payment of R $ 11.1 million in a Santa Catarina court account after being notified in the respirators process.

It was not the first time that Councilman Didê had acted as a representative for Veigamed. According to Mauricio Miranda de Mello, partner of MMJS, a company in Mato Grosso that presented one of the defeated facade proposals in the purchase of respirators, he met Didê on April 8 at an office in Guarulhos, which is the fiscal address of three Guasti companies, including Meu Vale. There, they took over the purchase of the evidence. Mello states that Didê appeared at that time as a representative of Veigamed.

The investigation investigating the purchase of respirators cites another one, opened by the Federal Police Station at Guarulhos airport and investigating the theft of the covid-19 tests. Due to this other investigation, Mello submitted a request tohabeas corpus preventive not to be arrested. In the request, curiously, his defense mentions the meeting with Didê at the Meu Vale headquarters. Guarulhos’s investigation is secret.

Veigamed stated that the mayor of São João de Meriti offers “occasional security consulting services,” but vowed that they are unrelated to the company’s contracts with the city.

In 2018, according to the Rio de Janeiro Court of Accounts, Veigamed received R $ 1 million from the municipality of São João de Meriti in exchange for the supply of medical and hospital products. The money came from the Municipal Health Fund.

Despite the fact that MMJS was responsible for one of the proposals for the sale of respirators defeated by Veigamed, an adviser to the company denied, on Tuesday 12, that it participated in the dispute in Santa Catarina. In 2017 MMJS, which at the time was called Bau Holdings, was the subject of an investigation opened by the Mato Grosso court on suspicion of illegal sale of cryptocurrencies and the formation of a pyramid scheme.

We send emails to Councilor Didê’s advisor and the São João do Meriti City Council. No response was sent until the publication of this report. The space is open for comments.