A police chief familiar with the negotiations said the decision shows the Federal Police is acting on technical grounds. “If there is content, under the terms of the law, we move forward; if there isn’t, we reject it,” he said.

The same person said the rejection also shows that the Federal Police “does not force anyone to cooperate, does not impose conditions that are not in the law, and does not suggest names to be ‘handed over.’”

Frustration with proposal

Investigators had already been signaling dissatisfaction since the so-called annexes were submitted to the Federal Police and the Prosecutor General’s Office, which is also reviewing the proposal.

One sign of that frustration came on Monday (18), when the former banker was transferred to a smaller cell at the Federal Police headquarters in Brasília. Vorcaro had left the Papuda Penitentiary Complex in mid-March, after it was agreed that he would begin talks aimed at reaching a plea deal.

On Monday, however, Vorcaro left a 12-square-meter room with air conditioning, a minibar, and a private bathroom, and was moved to one of the cells used for pretrial detainees, a smaller and simpler space than the one he had occupied before, which had been adapted to receive former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Vorcaro was placed in preventive detention during the third phase of Operation Compliance Zero, launched on March 4. He later changed his defense team and began negotiating a plea deal. Criminal lawyer José Luís Oliveira Lima was brought in to handle the talks. Contacted by Valor on Wednesday, he did not comment.

Since the start of the investigations, the Federal Police’s position was that a plea deal would be viable only if the former banker provided relevant information implicating people “higher up” who were also involved in the multibillion-real frauds.

Investigators concluded that this did not happen. Recently, for example, the Federal Police launched an operation targeting Senator Ciro Nogueira (Progressive Party, Piauí). He, however, was not mentioned in the annexes submitted by Vorcaro.

According to the investigation, the president of the Progressive Party received a kind of monthly allowance from the banker at the time to represent his interests in Congress, an allegation Nogueira denies.