Brazil PF finds email tying Flávio Bolsonaro ally Willer Tomaz to Rio Pag, Loterj’s payments operator

Brazil’s Federal Police says material seized from lawyer Willer Tomaz’s phone includes an email in which he acknowledges to a financial institution that he is a partner in Rio Pag, the company that processes payments for lottery bets and sports bets tied to Loteria do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Loterj). For payment and acquiring teams, the interesting part is not the political name-dropping; it is the ownership trail, the fragmented flows, and the fact that the operator sits inside a contract now under suspicion.

1. The email was found in data seized from Tomaz’s phone by the Polícia Federal (PF). Tomaz is a close friend of presidential hopeful Flávio Bolsonaro (PL). Until recently, he had denied any equity relationship with Rio Pag and said he was only the company’s lawyer.
2. When asked again, Tomaz said he maintains an “indirect participation” in the company through “a chain of duly formed companies, registered with the commercial registries and with their own management.” He also said he does not take part in “the management of any company in the chain.” His sister, Christine Tomaz, is a director of Empresa Brasileira de Sistemas de Computação (Embrasis), which is the sole shareholder of Capital Pretium S.A., which in turn is the sole controller of Rio Pag.
3. According to reporting cited by the text, Rio Pag has already billed R$ 188 million under the Loterj contract since it was signed in 2023, while Loterj received R$ 45,2 million from bets over the same period. The service was provided under a controversial contract signed during the administration of Cláudio Castro (PL), also an ally of Flávio Bolsonaro.
4. Financial intelligence reports from Coaf, reviewed by the column’s team, show that accounts linked to Willer Tomaz received R$ 285,6 million from Embrasis between March 2024 and March 2026. The PF says the same money may be counted more than once because transfers were heavily fragmented and moved across several related company accounts, sometimes looping through some of them more than once.
5. As one example, between March and May 2025, Tomaz’s Magnum Bank account sent R$ 24,5 million in split transfers to Rio Pag and other companies linked to him. The PF also detected transfers of R$ 1,05 million to Embrasis. Investigators say this pattern could make it harder to identify the origin, destination, and final economic beneficiary of the funds.

The PF also found evidence in Tomaz’s phone cloud that he had access to Rio Pag’s corporate account at BTG Pactual through his personal registration, which investigators take as further indication that his role went beyond that of outside counsel. For PSPs and acquiring teams, this is the sort of setup that tends to trigger questions about beneficial ownership, account access, intra-group fund movement, and whether the payment flow is actually as cleanly separated as the paperwork says.