The Federal Court appealed the decision of the Federal Court of Brasília that determined one of the company’s leniency agreement, under the argument that the company wants to create a more advantageous “third agreement” through the courts.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Wesley brothers’ company is trying to reduce the fine while maintaining the benefits obtained in the agreement, such as immunity from civil and criminal actions, which would illicitly break the negotiating balance.
The body states that partial revision of the agreement is prohibited by law and that the only possible way is to undo it entirely, with the loss of all these benefits. When contacted, J&F has not yet responded.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office’s appeal is addressed to the TRF-1 (Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region) and is confidential. The body also argues that there is no risk of bankruptcy in the company’s compliance with the agreement, as the fine was divided into 25 years and that there was a strategic and voluntary choice by the company to sign the agreement in 2017.
In the appeal, it is still argued that even if the company considered itself coerced, the deadline to annul the agreement for this reason expired in 2021.
In November, a federal judge in the Federal District ordered the recalculation of J&F’s fine, for “excessive burden”, and understood that the company suffered coercion when closing the agreement with the Federal Public Ministry for this amount. The company estimates that, with the reduction, the value will drop to R$1 billion.
The judge ordered that the original sanction be annulled and that the clause that determined the fine be recalculated after full deduction of all amounts paid by the company to the United States Department of Justice due to the same facts.
He also said that the limitation of the calculation base must be exclusively related to J&F’s activities, revenues and contracts under Brazilian jurisdiction and “directly related to the illicit activities covered by the agreement”.
A leniency agreement is a type of plea bargain by a company, in which it points out irregularities that were committed and agrees to pay a fine in exchange for benefits in court.
At the time, J&F said that the recalculation “undoes an injustice, by recognizing J&F’s lack of voluntariness in its signature and the stain on the calculation and its legality”.
“Considering the calculations carried out by the MPF based on the law, J&F estimates that the corrected value of the fine is around R$1 billion, despite Operation Spoofing [que investigou responsáveis pela invasão hacker a aparelhos de integrantes da Lava Jato] having revealed that the correct value of the fine would be R$595 million”, stated the company.
The Batista company has been trying to recalculate the values of its leniency agreement in recent years.
Having reached an agreement only with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and not with the (Comptroller General of the Union), J&F made agreements with construction companies involved in the scandals revealed by the minister, of the (Supreme Federal Court).
At the end of 2023, the STF minister gave a decision that benefited the company and suspended payment of the R$10.3 billion fine in the leniency agreement.
In the same decision, Toffoli to have access to the full messages from Operation Spoofing, which includes conversations between Lava Jato prosecutors.
In response to Toffoli’s decision, minister André Mendonça opened a negotiation table at the beginning of 2024 between the construction companies that signed leniency agreements and the Union.
Only companies that signed leniency with the (Attorney General of the Union) and the CGU, federal government bodies, which was not the case with J&F.
