José Antonio Dias Toffoli is a justice on Brazil's Federal Supreme Court (STF).
When the case against Daniel Vorcaro, head of Banco Master, came to the STF, a lottery system assigned its leadership to Mr Toffoli. Around the time he took over the case he flew on a private jet with a lawyer for the bank. He subsequently reduced the time given for witnesses to testify to the federal police and barred most of the police's forensic experts from accessing material seized from Mr Vorcaro—a decision he later walked back. It emerged that Mr Vorcaro had invested in a luxury resort owned by Mr Toffoli's brothers, in which Mr Toffoli himself holds a stake. A confidential police report alleged phone calls between Mr Toffoli and Mr Vorcaro, meetings between the two, and messages discussing payments of 20m reais ($4m) to a firm co-owned by Mr Toffoli. Mr Toffoli denies wrongdoing, saying the payments related to the sale of shares in the resort and were declared to tax authorities. After mounting pressure, he stepped aside from the case.
In 2019 Crusoé, a local investigative outlet, reported links between Mr Toffoli and the boss of Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction firm at the heart of Latin America's biggest-ever corruption scandal. Alexandre de Moraes used his authority as head of the fake-news inquiry to order the article scrubbed from the internet; only public outcry forced a reversal. Mr Toffoli went on to annul all fines against Odebrecht, despite the firm's executives having admitted to running a department dedicated to paying $800m in bribes to politicians.
Mr Toffoli pushed back immediately against a proposal by Edson Fachin, president of the STF, that the court adopt an ethics code. Mr Toffoli says he has never judged a case in which there was a conflict of interest and claims the adoption of an ethics code is not necessary.
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