'Brother, I am with you': Banco Master scandal engulfs both camps as Brazil votes on Sunday

Two days before Brazil's presidential election, the country's biggest banking fraud has done what no campaign could: put the entire political class in the dock. The Banco Master scandal — a multibillion-dollar fraud that prosecutors call the largest in Brazil's history — has entangled both presidential camps, a Supreme Court justice, and a former president's family, with voters heading to the polls on Sunday in a race too close to call.

At the centre is Daniel Vorcaro, the bank's disgraced former owner, in pretrial detention since March after the bank was liquidated late last year. Vorcaro is accused of cheating clients, including state pension funds, on a massive scale. The investigation exploded when federal police mined his seized phone and found his contacts read like a directory of Brazilian power.

On one side: Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the far-right frontrunner and eldest son of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro. Unsealed court documents detail how Vorcaro's phone showed roughly $12 million transferred in 2025 to a US-based fund linked to Flávio's brother Eduardo to finance "Dark Horse," a biopic of the elder Bolsonaro starring Jim Caviezel. In an audio message, Flávio told the banker: "Brother, I am and always will be with you." Justice André Mendonça opened an inquiry in July into alleged money laundering, illicit foreign exchange and corruption. Flávio acknowledges seeking the banker's backing and denies wrongdoing.

On the other side: Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes — the judge who led the case that sent Jair Bolsonaro to prison, and a figure the right paints as an ally of President Lula. A federal police report cites contacts with a number attributed to Moraes around the banker's arrest, and a contract worth about 131 million reais (roughly $24 million) between Banco Master and the law firm of Moraes's wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes. Moraes denies wrongdoing, says most of the cited notes were never WhatsApp conversations with him, and has not been charged. But the appearance of proximity alone has plunged the court into crisis.

The scandal has electrified a knife-edge race. Pollster Quaest puts Flávio a point ahead, 42 to 41; Datafolha gives Lula 46 to 44 — both inside the margin of error, with a runoff on October 25 all but certain. Lula's campaign accuses Donald Trump — who backs "his candidate" Flávio — of plotting to "colonise Brazil." Flávio, meanwhile, has promised five supermax prisons modelled on El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, betting that fear of violent crime will carry him home.

Whoever wins, the lesson of Vorcaro's phone book is already written: when bankers and judges, ministers and candidates all orbit the same fraud, the rot is not in one party — it is the system itself. Brazil's voters are being asked to choose between two camps, both photographed in the wreckage of the same bank.