Brazil Federal Police freeze up to R$ 670,348,945.70 in Digimais case tied to Edir Macedo

Brazil’s Federal Police launched Operation Mirage on Tuesday to dismantle a suspected fraud scheme inside the National Financial System involving Digimais, a bank controlled by the group of Bishop Edir Macedo, founder and leader of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD). For PSPs and banks, the relevant part is not the religious branding; it is the alleged use of accounting manipulation, false reporting, and possible upstream transfers to the bank’s parent company.

1. Authorities said more than 50 federal agents carried out searches at nine locations under warrants issued by the Federal Court of São Paulo. The same order authorized the lifting of bank and tax secrecy for the people under investigation, plus seizure and freezing of assets worth up to R$ 670,348,945.70, or about 125 million dollars.
2. During the investigation, Federal Police accessed reports prepared by Brazil’s Central Bank that reportedly pointed to serious irregularities in how the bank’s administrators handled the institution. That matters because once the regulator’s own reporting is in the record, the case stops being a simple internal governance issue and becomes a payment-rail and licensing-risk problem.
3. The investigators say the scheme involved the systematic manipulation of balance sheets and accounting results in order to hide the bank’s true economic and financial position and create an appearance of solvency before regulators. The same alleged conduct also enabled overvaluation of assets and the artificial generation of income worth hundreds of millions of reais.
4. Police are also examining financial transactions that were allegedly carried out irregularly for the benefit of the bank’s parent company, as well as the possible insertion of false or manipulated information into the official systems used by the financial-sector regulator.
5. Digimais sits inside a broader business empire controlled by Macedo, who is also the owner of multiple businesses and Record, his media group. The source also notes that he has supported Jair Bolsonaro publicly and has built a public profile far beyond banking, which is useful background only because the institution under investigation is not a stand-alone financial vehicle.

Edir Macedo is 81 years old and has written at least 34 best-sellers, with more than 10 million books sold. He began his evangelical path in 1974 and later built a media and business holding around Record; in other words, this is a case where bank governance, media power, and regulated payments infrastructure all sit in the same orbit.