Between April and May 2011, the Pará civil police were investigating the kidnapping of a businessman in the municipality of Mãe do Rio, near the Belém-Brasília highway. With judicial authorization, the phones of one of the people who could be part of the gang, Gilson Silva de Almeida, began to be tapped. One day, he called the owner of the farm where he worked, which is located in Castanhal. This phone automatically became part of the police wiretap.
By monitoring the calls, the center recorded a conversation between the farm owner and a woman who contacted him. The police soon learned that it was Izabela Jatene, Simão Jatene’s daughter. Four months earlier, he had resumed the state government, for the PSDB, after a first term between 2003 and 2007, preventing Ana Júlia Carepa, of the PT, from being reelected. And her interlocutor was the undersecretary of the State Treasury, Nilo Rendeiro de Noronha.
The main part of the conversation recorded the following interventions by Izabela Jatene:
Izabela – Nilo, can you get me the list of the thirteen largest companies in the State?
Izabela – Can you? Can you send it to my e-mail?
Izabela – Let’s start getting that money from them, okay…
She gives her e-mail to receive the list promised by the undersecretary and concludes the conversation:
– Can you? Okay? Okay. I’ll wait, okay, bro? Kisses, thanks.
The transcript of the tape was released by Diário do Pará on Sunday, the 21st, with a headline on the front page and two inside pages.
O Liberal, the spokesperson and standard-bearer of Jatene’s reelection campaign, against that of Helder Barbalho, from the PMDB, one of the owners of Diário, reacted today. He accused his rival of falsifying the transcription of the tape, suppressing a part in which Izabela Jatene said what would be the destination of the “little money”: the Pro Paz Program, which would be discontinued during Ana Júlia’s government and was being rebuilt by a new management committee, which included the governor’s daughter. The fraud was intended to harm her father and was nothing more than a dirty trick to harm him at the height of the election campaign. But he did not say whether or not the list was delivered, which the government’s opponents suggest it was.
The Diário was already expecting this reaction. The newspaper only published the conversation when it already had a report from Ricardo Molina’s famous forensic laboratory in Campinas, São Paulo. The report confirmed that the voices were indeed those of Izabela and Nilo, and that the tape was intact. The expert found “no evidence of fraudulent manipulation” in the material provided to him for examination. If the private report has been proven in court (work that will need to be done on the copy in the newspaper’s possession, since the original tape was allegedly erased by the police), it means that the reference to Pro Paz was added later, to serve as a defense for the governor’s daughter.
The amendment may turn out worse than the sonnet. But this is still a controversial issue, although the meaning of the conversation and its outcome indicate that at no time was the application of “their money” for Pro Paz presented, according to O Liberal’s version.
But even if Izabela Jatene called the undersecretary to find a way – even if unorthodox, to say the least – to find funds for the program (which has always been electoral), the situation leaves both interlocutors in a bad light.
The undersecretary could not provide the list of the 300 companies that contribute the most to the state’s tax revenue. Such a list does not exist. To create it, someone authorized to access the database would have to do research and prepare the ranking, which means an aggravation of the administrative irregularity, since the request was not official, was not made in writing or by a competent administrative authority, in the absence of a judicial request.
The request was made by someone who was not authorized to do so. Even if Izabela requested the information officially, it could not be granted. Sending by email a set of information that is disaggregated in the database and is confidential constitutes a serious functional offense, no matter how noble the intention of the governor’s daughter was.
The ease with which she obtained what she wanted and by the means she used, her cell phone, receiving a prompt promise of assistance, without any formality, characterizes another offense that the Diário do Pará itself did not record: influence peddling, which is a habitual informality for an elite that treats public affairs as an extension of private affairs, but is always illegal, undesirable and intolerable. The Barbalho family newspaper states in its edition today that, after checking the data on the Transparency Portal, on Siafen (the federal administration’s financial control system) and on the 2011 State General Balance Sheet, it did not find “any record of donations from companies to the Pro Paz program accounts or to the departments that participate in the program”. Helder Barbalho’s propaganda has already begun to ask: where did the money go?
