Corrupção e lavagem de dinheiro: a perícia contábil criminal na operação lava jato

Abstract

The corruption in Brazil is century-old and its tragic consequences can be observed in areas that continuously lack resources, such as the public health system or education. Commonly, public funds that corruptors divert away from its true destination are not available for use unless they are disconnected from their criminal origin, what makes corruption and money laundering frequently coexist. The “Operação Lava Jato” —that since 2014 deals with embezzlement schemes of public funds involving politicians, civil servants and businesspersons— has shown that, in fact, corruption is one of the several crimes that predicate money laundering. This research went through one hundred and twelve case files related to the “Operação Lava Jato” kept at the Federal Justice's electronic system (“eProc”) aiming to verify the contribution brought by the forensic accounting to the comprehension of money laundering procedures, as well as to the identification of materiality and authorship of predicate offenses. There were nineteen cases on money laundering that had the forensic accounting reports available in the system and they constituted the samples selected for study. The accusation complaints, the forensic reports and the verdicts made up six thousand, three hundred and seventeen pages submitted to the content analysis. The codification of the content of each report was based on analysis categories derived from the usual money laundering typifying, encompassing authorship, product resulting, concealment procedures and malice. Out of the nineteen cases studied, seventeen had forensic accounting reports that pointed out the components associated to the analysis categories and showed to be fundamental elements to the understanding and typification of money laundering and predicate crimes investigated by the “Operação Lava Jato”, serving as evidence for accusations and trial decisions. It has also been observed the instruments mostly used by forensic accountants when dealing with subjects like financial relationship between offenders or the use of shell companies for money laundering.