The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Hugo Motta (Republicans-PB), housed in his Jeronimo Arlindo da Silva Junior office, known as Junior do Peixe, former director of the National Confederation of Family Farmers and Rural Family Entrepreneurs (Conafer), one of the entities investigated by the Federal Police by fraud in INSS. The information is from the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.
Junior do Peixe was Motta’s parliamentary secretary between October 2020 and February 2021, when he also worked as Director of Institutional Affairs of Conafer. In 2024, he tried to be a candidate for deputy mayor in Marizópolis (PB), by Republicans, Motta’s party. On social networks, you can see several posts in which the former advisor appears next to the mayor.
Confer is the target of investigating the Federal Police, which investigates fraud in associative discounts applied to Retirement and Pensions of the INSS. The entity is the second largest in volume of discounts, with R $ 484 million accumulated between 2019 and 2024, behind only from Contag (National Confederation of Agriculture Workers), which.
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Investigation documents show that in December 2020, while working for Motta, Junior do Peixe signed a letter that explained to be ahead of a working group to gather Conofer associative tokens, which would be sent to the INSS. In the same document, he claimed to be responsible for receiving legal citations in cases of fraud in discounts.
Conafer’s collection with associative discounts has shot in a few years. In 2019, the entity received R $ 350 thousand. The following year, the amount jumped to R $ 57 million, and continued to grow, reaching R $ 92.2 million in 2022 and R $ 202.3 million in 2023.
The opposition pressures for the creation of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) to, but the installation of the commission depends on the decision of Hugo Motta. The mayor argues that there are 11 other requests for CPI in line and that the house regiment only allows the operation of five simultaneous committees.
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Given the difficulty, the opposition (CPMI), which involves deputies and senators and depends on authorization from the president of Congress, Davi Alcolumbre (Union-AP).
The operation without discount, the Federal Police and the Comptroller General of the Union, investigates the involvement of 11 entities in fraud that total R $ 6.3 billion between 2019 and 2024. As a consequence, the Attorney General’s Office (AGU) requested the blockade of R $ 2.56 billion based on the Anti-Corruption Law, but Conafer and Contag were deleted from the action.
