The "chocolate operation" started at dawn. At 6:40 a.m. on Wednesday, December 18, the Rio de Janeiro military police knock on the door of the Kopenhagen sugar refinery store, on the first floor of the Via Parque shopping center in the Barra da Tijuca district, in the west of the city. . They will stay there for four long hours, seizing account statements and compromising documents. You had to be careful because the target is important: nothing less than Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of the President of Brazil.
Holder of 50% of the shares of the chocolate store, he is suspected by justice of embezzlement of public funds and money laundering, during the period when he was a member of the State of Rio, between 2003 and 2018. In the As part of this vast investigation, 24 searches were carried out this Wednesday on relatives of the Bolsonaro family, including Ana Cristina Siqueira Valle, former wife of Jair Bolsonaro.
Started two years ago, the investigation focuses today on the personality of Fabricio Queiroz, ex-parliamentary assistant of Flavio and old friend of the Bolsonaro, designated as the "Pivot" of a system "Rachadinha" : a practice as illegal as it is current, consisting in an elected official to divert for his profit the wages of employees of his cabinet, often ghosts, remunerated by public money.
Suspected involvement of the mafia
According to the prosecution, quoted by the press, at least 483 suspicious deposits, in cash, were made on the account of Queiroz alone, for a final amount exceeding 2 million reais (nearly 450,000 euros). Worse still, part of this sum would have passed through the bank accounts of Adriano Magalhaes da Nobrega, mafia chief in the western zone of Rio, suspected of being involved in the assassination, in 2018, of Marielle Franco.
In order to launder these lucrative "Rachadinhas" Flavio Bolsonaro used, according to the press, the goodwill of his chocolate maker (where 1.6 million reais, or 353,000 euros of dirty money, would have been recycled), but also carried out several real estate transactions, buying in cash two apartments in the Copacabana district, "washing" this time 638,400 reais (141,000 euros).
All these cases, against the backdrop of complex financial movements, throw a harsh light on the activities of the cabinet of "Flavio", transformed into a washing machine for dirty money, but also more broadly on the dubious relationships of the Bolsonaro family in its "base" in the western zone of Rio, where mafia and militiamen cross paths with great fortunes, and therefore with politicians.
