Lawyer hired to defend their rights also intends to hold accountable auditors of PwC

01/18/2023

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Legal strategy targets personal assets of executives and the controlling group — Foto: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg

Minority shareholders of retail giant Americanas will request the Prosecution Service (MPF) in Brasília to investigate criminal responsibilities and freeze assets of those responsible for a potential fraud that resulted in accounting inconsistencies totaling R$20 billion unveiled by the company last week.

“From the standpoint of criminal law, I’m not going after the business; I’m going after the individuals,” says criminal lawyer Daniel Gerber, hired by a group of the retailer’s minority shareholders. “It makes no difference to me whether Americanas goes into receivership,” he adds.

This is because Mr. Gerber’s legal strategy targets the personal assets of executives of Americanas and of the controlling group, who “by action or omission” are responsible for the multi-billion loss. The lawyer also intends to hold the executive directors of PwC, the company that audited Americanas’s earning reports, accountable.

Last Friday, the MPF in São Paulo started to investigate evidence of insider trading in the sale of Americanas shares. Mr. Gerber explains that a second possibility would be to request to join this case as a victim. An asset manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was surprised that the former CEO of Americanas, Sérgio Rial, participated last week in a closed conversation at BTG Pactual with investors and analysts about Americanas’s situation.

“It’s the basic premise of the stock market: everyone should have access to the same information. It’s a public market,” says the financial market source, adding that the information disclosed in the conversation between Mr. Rial and the investors was only available to a limited group of interested parties.

In this source’s view, Americanas failed both in the way the inconsistencies were disclosed to the market and in the explanations afterwards. “They [Rial and the executives who had just joined the company] had to take the problem, study it, and explain to the market exactly what happened. To this day, we don’t know exactly what occurred,” criticizes the manager.

A second source, who closely follows the unfolding of the crisis in court, says the company’s main goal at the moment is to reach an agreement with the creditor banks. The tension between the retailer and its creditors grew after the decision in court on Friday granting Americanas protection from creditors for 30 days. In the evaluation of this second source, issues such as the possibility of foreign shareholders to file a class action are secondary at the moment.

*By Rodrigo Carro — Rio de Janeiro

Source: Valor International

https://valorinternational.globo.com/