[ad_1]
Target of the defense of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (Republicans-RJ), the fiscal auditor Christiano Paes Leme Botelho was exonerated from the position of head of the Internal Revenue Service in Rio de Janeiro (Escor07).
Botelho is at the center of the senator’s new defense strategy, who claims to have evidence that his fiscal data was accessed in an irregular manner before the investigation began on the alleged “crack” in his previous cabinet in the Legislative Assembly.
Flávio’s lawyers do not accuse the auditor of accessing the senator’s data. But President Jair Bolsonaro, GSI (Office of Institutional Security) and PGR (Attorney General’s Office) pointed out similar cases that allegedly involved Botelho to reinforce the thesis of the practice.
The auditor had led Escor07 for at least 13 years. He was appointed as an influential name in the tax authorities who managed to remain in office in different administrations.
The work coordinated by Botelho provided the working group of Operation Lava Jato from Rio de Janeiro in two investigations against tax auditors on suspicion of collection of bribes during the performance of tax authorities.
The first operation, Armadeira, arrested the auditor Marco Aurélio Canal, national supervisor of the Lava Jato Special Programming Team, a group responsible for imposing fines on those accused of the operation for tax evasion.
He was not involved in the investigations, but he was involved in the post-op target assessments.
The canal controller had his name mentioned last year in the case of files prepared by the Internal Revenue Service on 134 public agents, including Minister Gilmar Mendes, of the STF (Supreme Federal Court).
The pressure on Botelho increased after Flávio’s defense informed the president of the accusations against him that ran in a process of disillusionment in SindFisco (National Union of Tax Auditors).
A union commission indicated that Botelho filed anonymous complaints against opponents and accessed tax data in an irregular manner to persecute opponents.
Flávio’s defense denounced the case to the president, GSI and PGR, pointing out that the Escor07 group benefited from the so-called “invisibility cloak”, a loophole in the Revenue system that restricts access to consultations made by auditors posted in both Matters internal as in the sector of tax investigations.
The Internal Revenue Ordinance provides that the “logs” (files that store the queries made to the tax system) of these servers cannot be consulted by the Audit and Internal Affairs members, in charge of monitoring and analyzing the irregularities in the agency.
Only the top of the tax authorities (the secretary of the Internal Revenue Service, the Internal Affairs Officer, the Deputy Internal Affairs Officer and another person designated by them) can have access to the queries made by the investigators of the Internal Revenue Service .
The suspicion of Flávio’s team is that he was the victim of a practice similar to that revealed by messages obtained by The Intercept Brasil and analyzed by leaf and the website, where prosecutors for Operation Lava Jato informally obtained confidential tax data.
In the Official Gazette of this Thursday (3), the exemption appears as “upon request”. But the leaf He discovered that the departure was due to pressure after criticism from Flávio’s lawyers.
Flávio’s defense movement took place in August this year and aims to annul the investigation into the “fissures”.
The senator was charged with leading a criminal organization that collected part of the salaries of some of his former advisers in the Assembly. The embezzled money was used, according to the Rio de Janeiro Public Ministry, for Flávio’s personal expenses.
The operator of the scheme would be Fabrício Queiroz, Flávio’s former assistant and friend of President Jair Bolsonaro.
The accusation of embezzlement, embezzlement, money laundering and criminal organization has not yet been analyzed by the Special Organ of the Court of Justice of Rio de Janeiro.
The lawyers called GSI and Serpro (Federal Data Processing Service) to try to obtain evidence of the alleged irregular access. Serpro keeps track of all queries to taxpayers’ data, the so-called “registries”.
In a statement, Flávio’s defense stated that he called the GSI because the alleged irregular access was “practiced against a member of the family of the President of the Republic.”
The GSI said in a note that it was informally briefed by the defense of the senator’s case.
“In light of what was presented to us, what could seem a matter of institutional security, was configured as a subject, dealt with within the scope of the Internal Revenue Service, of an internal nature of that body and already prosecuted. Therefore, the GSI did not take any resulting action. It understood that, within its legal powers, it was not responsible for any action on the matter. “
