A letter, a substitute’s company, and a Senate ethics body that has not met in more than two years
By Hotspotnews
In March 2026, O Globo published an exclusive that should have produced more than a news cycle. Senate President Davi Alcolumbre, of União Brasil and Amapá, had signed a 15-page official letter listing 90 pending works and projects and asking, “respectfully,” that R$379 million in leftover parliamentary amendments be released. The closing line was the usual Brasília courtesy: certainty of “valuable collaboration” and renewed “esteem and consideration.” The addressee was Davi Alcolumbre.
That is not a metaphor. The senator who coordinated the Amapá bench when the money was first indicated later occupied the chair of President of Congress. The document, dated April 2025, asked that chair to unlock “restos a pagar” — unpaid balances from commission amendments and from the old rapporteur’s budget, the arrangement the public came to know as the secret budget. O Globo and Revista Oeste reported that the sum was about five times the annual individual amendment quota of a single senator.
Of that total, R$30.5 million was tied to a project executed by a construction firm linked to Breno Chaves Pinto, Alcolumbre’s second Senate substitute. After the letter went out, allies moved to free the money. O Globo reported that 55 percent of the request, R$210.4 million, was directed to the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development, then headed by Waldez Góes, a name associated with Alcolumbre’s political orbit.
Alcolumbre’s office offered a procedural defense. The letter, it said, existed to comply with a 2025 agreement with the Supreme Court requiring identification of the sponsor of each amendment, including leftovers from earlier years. The standard form, the office added, is generated by the system and addressed to the President of Congress. When the same man is both requester and addressee, the form becomes a closed loop. Transparency on paper can still be self-service in practice.
The taxpayers’ question is simpler than the legal one. Public money is not a private inventory of a state bench. When the official who helps decide what moves also signs the request to himself, the conflict is visible even if a lawyer can describe it as compliance. Brazilians who fund the Union through taxes, fuel, payroll charges, and inflation do not get to write a courteous letter to themselves when a bill is late.
The substitute’s shadow
The R$30.5 million line would matter less if the contractor were a distant vendor. He was not. In July 2025 the Federal Police targeted Breno Chaves Pinto in Operation Route 156, an inquiry into alleged bidding fraud and diversions in DNIT contracts in Amapá, including maintenance work on the BR-156. CGU audits cited irregularities in contracts totaling about R$60.2 million.
In May 2026 the Federal Police concluded that front of the inquiry and indicted Pinto for alleged criminal association, influence peddling, and active corruption. The regional DNIT superintendent in Amapá, Marcello Linhares, was also indicted. O Globo, Folha, G1, and Estadão reported that investigators monitored Pinto withdrawing R$350,000 in cash and then entering a vehicle later tied to companies connected to relatives of the Senate president. Messages cited in the case included requests that “the senator” be pressed to speed federal commitments. One exchange, according to coverage of the police report, treated extra transfers as the fruit of “our senator’s dealings.”
Police and prosecutors have been explicit on a point that honesty requires repeating: Alcolumbre himself is not a defendant in that inquiry. Folha and Estadão reported that investigators found no evidence of his willful participation and therefore kept the case in ordinary federal court in Macapá rather than sending it to the Supreme Court under parliamentary privilege. Alcolumbre’s office said he has no role in his substitute’s business and does not interfere in DNIT contracting. That distinction is real. It is also incomplete. A president of the Senate can be legally untouched and still sit at the center of a political machine in which a substitute, a contractor, a state highway budget, and a self-addressed request for hundreds of millions occupy the same map.
Indictment is not conviction. Pinto has denied wrongdoing. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Macapá still had to decide whether to file charges. None of that erases the public interest problem: amendments drawn from national taxes were being chased through a letter the Senate president sent to himself, and a slice of the package touched a company belonging to a man later indicted over federal road money in the same state.
What “nobody did anything” actually means
There is no public record of a TCU judgment, a Federal Police case, or a congressional inquiry opened against Alcolumbre over the form of the letter. The story produced commentary, then fatigue. In Brasília that is often the entire sentence.
The Senate body that exists to examine a senator’s conduct has been missing in action. The Council of Ethics and Parliamentary Decorum last met on 9 July 2024, as Estadão, O Globo, Gazeta do Povo, and Veja have all reported. Through 2025 and into September 2026 it was not installed. Senate lawyers told the Supreme Court that installation is not an automatic act of the presidency; parties must name members and the calendar must allow it. The Senate press office has said the previous council’s term ended in March 2025 and the house is waiting for party nominations. The practical result is the same. At least 19 representations against various senators have sat without a rapporteur. Alcolumbre is among those named.
The complaints against him, filed by Senator Carlos Viana, the Novo party, citizens, and an association of lawyers, are mostly about another kind of power: the refusal to move impeachment requests against Supreme Court justices and to install certain parliamentary inquiries. They are not, on the public record, a trial of the April 2025 letter. That is part of the institutional failure. The ethics council is the in-house check on decorum. If it does not sit, a president of the Senate is judged only by headlines and by allies. Novo asked the Supreme Court in June 2026 to force the council’s installation. As of mid-September 2026 the body was still dormant.
A house that will not police itself cannot credibly lecture the country about republican virtue. A president who can leave that house’s ethics organ idle for more than two years is not a spectator of the delay. He is the officer whose signature is required to make the organ real.
Money without a master
Parliamentary amendments are sold as local development. In practice they have become a second budget, less visible than ministries and more useful to those who control the flow. After the Supreme Court tightened rules on the secret budget, Congress promised to name the sponsor of each leftover earmark. The Alcolumbre letter shows how a rule written for sunlight can be obeyed as a ritual. Identify the sponsor. Address the president. Sign both ends.
Fiscal conservatives do not need a conspiracy theory to object. They need only the hierarchy of claims. Taxpayers come first. Contractors close to a substitute come after. A senator’s convenience in moving “restos a pagar” through his own desk is not a public purpose. Even if every project on the 90-item list were a legitimate road, school, or clinic — and that has not been independently certified in the coverage of the letter — the method still teaches the country the wrong lesson: that national revenue is a regional stockpile, and that the man who holds the gavel may also hold the request.
Alcolumbre remains one of the most powerful men in the federal government. He returned to the Senate presidency in February 2025. He has survived earlier scandals, including old reports of payroll schemes in his office and later storms over the Banco Master affair, which he denies. Survival is not the same as clearance. It is often only proof that the cost of confronting a Senate president is higher than the cost of another editorial.
The conservative case is not that every rival of Alcolumbre is a saint. It is that public money is not a courtesy. A republic that allows the same official to petition himself for hundreds of millions, to leave the ethics council dark, and to treat conflict of interest as a formatting issue has stopped treating the taxpayer as the principal. It has treated him as a spectator who will forget by the next vote.
Sources: O Globo (Patrik Camporez exclusive, 13 March 2026); Revista Oeste (13 March 2026); Folha de S.Paulo (22 May 2026); G1 Amapá (22 May 2026); Estadão (May 2026 and 8 June 2026); Gazeta do Povo (3 August 2026); Veja (12 June and 5 August 2026); O Globo / Lauro Jardim (11 September 2026); Exame (22 May 2026); Senate statements and filings described in those reports, including the Senate advocacy response to Novo’s Supreme Court petition.
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