Messages found by Brazil’s Federal Police on Daniel Vorcaro’s cellphone show that Roberto Campos Neto, while serving as governor of Brazil’s central bank, invited the Banco Master owner to meet at his home in Fazenda Boa Vista, an upscale gated community in the state of São Paulo. The meeting ultimately did not take place there only because the property had been fumigated, prompting Campos Neto to move it that same day to the central bank’s offices on Avenida Paulista, according to O Globo.
The messages do not prove favoritism, interference in supervisory decisions or any wrongdoing. But they reveal an unusual degree of informality: the head of the regulator apparently saw nothing unusual in receiving at his private residence the controlling shareholder of an institution overseen by the authority he led. That matters because Campos Neto later sought to distance the central bank presidency from responsibility for Master’s specific operations, arguing that banks in the S3 regulatory segment were handled by the institution’s technical departments.
That argument may be formally correct, but it is incomplete. It was under Campos Neto, in October 2019, that the central bank’s board unanimously approved the transfer of control of Banco Máxima to Vorcaro, after the same transaction had been rejected months earlier under his predecessor, Ilan Goldfajn. There is no basis for saying that Campos Neto personally approved the deal or favored Vorcaro. But the newly disclosed messages make it harder to portray the central bank presidency as wholly removed from the banker and his institution. The 2019 approval and the earlier rejection were both unanimous decisions of the central bank’s board. Folha de S.Paulo
The broader point is about independence itself. During his tenure, Campos Neto became a symbol of central bank independence from government, resisting, among other things, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s public criticism of interest-rate policy. But independence cannot run in only one direction. A central bank needs protection from pressure by presidents and ministers, but it also needs sufficient distance from the banks, executives and investors it regulates. Independence, after all, has to work in every direction.
Campos Neto’s own trajectory makes that debate harder to ignore. In the second round of Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, he went to vote wearing the national soccer team’s yellow jersey, which at the time had become strongly associated with supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, although Campos Neto never disclosed how he voted. Folha de S.Paulo After leaving the central bank and completing the legally required six-month cooling-off period, he joined Nubank in 2025 as vice chairman and global head of public policy, a role that includes engagement with financial regulators. Nu Bank By the second quarter of 2026, Nubank had nearly 118 million customers in Brazil. Nu Bank The move was lawful, but it offers a particularly clear illustration of the revolving door between regulator and regulated.
None of this proves that Campos Neto has favored Master, or any other financial institution. The issue is institutional: a central bank’s credibility depends not only on the decisions it makes, but also on the distance it maintains from those affected by them. The Master affair suggests that Brazil’s debate may have been too narrow in asking only whether the central bank was independent from the government. The question should also be whether it remained sufficiently independent from the financial industry it was supposed to regulate.
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