‘Page turned’: Prosecutor assigned to dismantle kickback channel at São Paulo tax agency warned suspect, prosecutors say

Prosecutors investigating an alleged billion-real kickback scheme inside São Paulo’s Finance Department suspect that a tax auditor appointed to help dismantle the operation instead passed sensitive information to colleagues linked to it.

Arthur Rafael Gatti, the second-ranking member of a working group created after the investigation began, sent a message to Valmir Lucas Dornelles, whom prosecutors call a “corrupt public official.” Gatti said he would warn auditor André Weiss about the facts under investigation. The state Finance and Planning Secretariat said it was working with the Public Prosecutor’s Office on a rigorous investigation. Its actions have led to five dismissals, one removal from office and the unpaid suspension of 17 employees.

Weiss is the main target of Operation Caldarium, which involves 27 suspects. He was arrested on September 3 by order of Judge Nelson Augusto Bernardes de Souza. Weiss had been the third-ranking official in the state tax authority and previously served as Jundiaí’s tax delegate, director of Tax Auditing and executive director-general of Tax Administration. He left that final post in May.

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will warn

While in senior leadership, Weiss helped create the working group tasked with recalculating suspicious ICMS-ST reimbursements. Prosecutors describe those refunds as the channel through which kickbacks moved. Audio recorded during a July 2023 lunch in São Paulo’s Pinheiros neighborhood allegedly shows Weiss planning to build a sauna to launder money from bribes.

According to the investigation, after Operation Icarus in October 2025, Gatti told Dornelles that auditor Daniel Makita was worried because he had improperly processed reimbursement requests from three supermarket chains. Those requests could have been reviewed by the working group. Operation Icarus targeted the alleged queue-jumping scheme in ICMS-ST payments. Prosecutors say auditor Artur Gomes da Silva Neto, known as King, confessed to organizing it in exchange for bribes that reached 1 billion reais.

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corrupt public official