Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro personally asked jailed banker Daniel Vorcaro for tens of millions of reais to finance a biopic about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, according to voice messages published by The Intercept Brazil. The messages, sent in the final months of 2025, show the presumptive presidential hopeful urgently seeking payments for the independent film “The Dark Horse” — and contradict his repeated public denials of any relationship with the disgraced financier.
The voice exchanges, authenticated by the Associated Press, capture Bolsonaro asking Vorcaro for 61 million reais — roughly $12 million — in a series of audio messages sent between September and November. “Our case is of a son seeking PRIVATE sponsorship for a PRIVATE film about his father’s story. No public money,” Bolsonaro said in a statement Wednesday, after the recordings emerged. “I did not offer any (illegal) advantages in exchange. I did not have private encounters. I did not intermediate business with the government. I did not receive money.”
But the messages reveal a level of familiarity and financial pressure at odds with that account. Hours before the Intercept’s report, Bolsonaro told journalists in Brasília he had no association with Vorcaro. He made the same claim in March, after Brazilian media reported that his phone number had been found on one of Vorcaro’s seized devices. In the September recording, Bolsonaro says he is uncomfortable asking for money but adds that “the movie is in a very decisive moment” with many payments overdue. By November, his tone sharpened: “Don’t even think of us not paying (actor) Jim Caviezel, Cyrus (Nowrasteh, the film’s director). People of a high name in American and world cinema,” he tells Vorcaro. “Now that we are in the final stretch we cannot hesitate, otherwise we will lose the whole thing.” Vorcaro replies in a separate message that he will pay the following day.
Vorcaro, the former chief executive of Banco Master, was arrested in March and is the central figure in a sprawling fraud and graft scandal that has implicated dozens of high-ranking Brazilian officials. Federal police estimate the total fraud at approximately 12 billion reais ($2.3 billion); prosecutors say Vorcaro and his associates defrauded many of Banco Master’s 800,000 clients, including state pension funds, by steering them into dubious investments. Brazil’s Central Bank shuttered the institution, which had held over $16 billion in assets, in November. Since his arrest, Vorcaro has been seeking a plea deal.
The political fallout has been immediate. Bolsonaro, who has been positioning himself as the conservative opposition’s standard-bearer against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October’s election, huddled with allies from his Liberal Party in Brasília after the story broke and left without speaking to reporters. Political consultant Thomas Traumann said the revelation could be ruinous for a candidate whose chief qualification is his lineage. “As Flávio Bolsonaro is an unknown politician whose biggest asset is being son of the former president, a scandal like this could have a devastating impact,” Traumann said. “His asking for money and showing intimacy with a banker who is under police investigation for fraud could force Brazil’s opposition to change its candidate.”
Allies of Lula in Congress said they would push for a formal investigation into the connection between Flávio Bolsonaro and Vorcaro. The senator and his supporters, meanwhile, have tried, without providing evidence, to tie the scandal to Lula. Earlier this week, Ciro Nogueira, a senator who served as Jair Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, denied reports that he had received regular payments from Vorcaro.
Flávio Bolsonaro has said publicly that he intends to release “The Dark Horse” in the final stretch of the presidential campaign. The messages to Vorcaro suggest that the film — and its financing — were central to that plan. The scandal now threatens to overshadow the campaign itself, and to test whether a political legacy built on attacking corruption can survive its own entanglement with a jailed banker.