--- title: "Banco Master Fraud Case Hangs Over Brazil’s Tight Presidential Vote on Sunday" description: "Polls suggest voters blame the left more for the bank’s collapse, though the right-wing candidate is the one under investigation" author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-02T16:36:38Z modified: 2026-10-02T21:37:28Z url: https://rews.cc/a/banco-master-fraud-case-hangs-over-brazil-s-tight-presidenti-e58279 language: en tags: ["politics", "corruption", "brazil", "election", "banking", "latam"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Banco Master Fraud Case Hangs Over Brazil’s Tight Presidential Vote on Sunday *Polls suggest voters blame the left more for the bank’s collapse, though the right-wing candidate is the one under investigation* By rews desk · October 2, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/banco-master-fraud-case-hangs-over-brazil-s-tight-presidenti-e58279 ## In brief - Brazilians vote Sunday in the first round of the presidential election; a runoff is set for Oct. 25 - Lula and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro are essentially tied; rejection rates top 50% for both - Banco Master’s 2025 collapse forced a $7.7 billion payout, the largest in the guarantee fund’s history - Bolsonaro is under investigation for corruption and money laundering tied to the bank’s owner - A Datafolha poll found 34% associate the scandal with the left and 27% with the right Brazilians vote on Sunday in the first round of a presidential election being fought in the shadow of the Banco Master scandal, one of the largest fraud cases in the country’s modern history. The front-runner is President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, seeking an unprecedented fourth term after leading the country from 2003 to 2011. His main challenger is Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence for an attempted coup. With the two men [effectively tied in the final polls](https://rews.cc/a/bolsonaro-s-son-is-tied-with-lula-four-days-before-brazil-s--24a896), both campaigns have absorbed blows from the scandal. Neither candidate is much loved. In a late-September survey by the pollster Quaest, 56 percent of respondents said they would not vote for Mr. Bolsonaro, and 54 percent said the same of Mr. Lula. ‘Rates of rejection are really high for both candidates,’ Anthony W. Pereira, head of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, said in an interview with Al Jazeera. ‘That helps explain why mobilisation and enthusiasm are fairly low.’ Banco Master, a midsize lender, grew aggressively over the past decade by selling deposit certificates yielding up to 140 percent of Brazil’s benchmark interbank rate. But it did not have the assets to sustain those payouts, prosecutors say: it lacked the money to cover its risky loans, and the assets it did hold were diverted to shell accounts. The Central Bank liquidated Banco Master in 2025, after a severe funding squeeze, and its owner, Daniel Vorcaro, was arrested on accusations of money laundering and fraud. The collapse forced a payout of nearly $7.7 billion from Brazil’s Credit Guarantee Fund, the largest in the nonprofit deposit insurance fund’s history. Investigators say Mr. Vorcaro shielded the scheme by cultivating the powerful. Mr. Bolsonaro is among those caught in it. Last month the Supreme Court unsealed documents showing that the senator is under investigation for corruption and money laundering connected to Mr. Vorcaro. Audio recordings have also surfaced in which he appears to solicit millions of dollars from the banker to finance *Dark Horse*, a film about his imprisoned father. The senator has denied wrongdoing, calling the exchange a private sponsorship opportunity unrelated to the scandal. Yet voters see it otherwise. A September survey by the polling institute Datafolha found that 34 percent of respondents associated the scandal mostly with left-wing politicians, against 27 percent who linked it more to the right; 13 percent saw politicians of all stripes involved and 16 percent had no answer. ‘Make no mistake, this is a corruption scandal that predominantly involves the right,’ Leonardo Paz, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, said in an interview with Al Jazeera, arguing that press coverage striving for balance created a false equivalence. ‘Flávio’s up to his neck in this scandal.’ Mr. Lula himself has not been directly tied to the case. His exposure runs through Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court, a frequent target of the right. Earlier this year a rival justice released a document purporting to show Mr. Vorcaro composing messages to Justice de Moraes, in some cases asking for legal advice. The justice has denied exchanging any messages with the banker, dismissing the accusation as an ‘incriminating farce for political and electoral purposes.’ Justice de Moraes, appointed in 2017 by President Michel Temer, a center-right figure, later blocked Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to overturn his 2022 defeat and oversaw the criminal case that sent the former president to prison. Allies call that prosecution a political ‘witch hunt.’ ‘Anyone voting for Lula is voting for Alexandre de Moraes,’ Mr. Bolsonaro has said on the campaign trail. ‘Flávio is far more implicated \[in the Banco Master scandal\], but he’s gotten lucky,’ Mr. Pereira said. ‘Some lazily assume that Alexandre de Moraes is more or less the same as Lula, so it becomes a wash.’ Neither candidate is expected to take the 50 percent of valid votes needed to win outright in the first round. Also running are the self-help author Augusto Cury and the right-wing figures Ronaldo Caiado, Renan Santos and Romeu Zema, who together poll at just over 10 percent, and their endorsements could decide a runoff, Jorge Chaloub, a political scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said in an interview with Al Jazeera. ‘Ideologically, the other candidates are more to the right, and you’d expect them to side with Flávio,’ he said. But he cautioned: ‘There’s a reason that those voters didn’t choose Flávio Bolsonaro in the first place.’ A second round, if needed, is scheduled for Oct. 25.