piauí magazine lists the suspicions it says Flávio took in his 'luggage' to the US
A piauí text published after the senator's flight to Miami gathers investigations and earlier reports about him; the content reflects the magazine's view.
Translated from the Portuguese original by the Panorama newsroom. Read in Portuguese
Summary written by the Panorama newsroom from the sources listed below. Facts are attributed to the original publications.
piauí magazine published a text on October 28 about Flávio Bolsonaro's trip to the United States. According to the magazine, the senator, beaten by Lula by more than 4 million votes, left the country with his wife and two daughters, passed through Foz do Iguaçu and Puerto Iguazú and boarded a private jet, arriving in Miami the next morning.
piauí says the trip postpones the senator's reckoning with Brazilian justice. He is under investigation in two Supreme Federal Court (STF) inquiries: one on transfers from Daniel Vorcaro, allegedly to finance the film Dark Horse, and another on suspected money laundering involving lawyer Willer Tomaz. Having lost the election, he loses his mandate in February and, according to the magazine, his special court privilege.
The magazine says the right itself hesitates to accept the political-persecution narrative and revisits reports it had already published. They include its reporting on requests for 24 million dollars from Vorcaro, the revelation of a 2020 boat outing sponsored by lobbyists interested in the Covaxin vaccine, and the Federal Police investigation into an alleged hidden partnership in the betting firm Best Bet.
The text also cites Flávio's longstanding ties to Rio militias, such as the commendation motion for Adriano da Nóbrega when he was a state legislator, and a 200,000-real amendment sent in 2023 to a project in a militia area at the request of a man arrested over the Marielle Franco case, according to piauí.
Finally, the magazine recalls the ghost-employee case, which led to a 2020 indictment over the diversion of 6.1 million reais but was invalidated in 2021 by STF and STJ decisions that annulled evidence. The publicly available part includes no response from Flávio Bolsonaro to the accusations; the text expresses the publication's reading.