Vorcaro’s Party: A Different Kind of Investigation

Daniel Vorcaro apparently took networking very seriously.

On October 31, 2023, a Halloween party in São Paulo organized for Daniel Vorcaro, then Banco Master’s controlling shareholder, brought together about 120 women and 20 men, according to messages made public from material examined by Brazil’s Federal Police.

Six to one.

Since I’m married, I’ll analyze that ratio strictly from the standpoint of political science.

My wife reads my articles too.

The episode would have been just a private extravagance, and a much less interesting story for this article, had those messages not become public in the context of the investigations involving Vorcaro and Banco Master.

Before we hit the gas, it’s worth tapping the brakes. There is an ongoing investigation. There are messages and documents that were actually found and examined, and there are Federal Police interpretations of some of that material. Some of the people mentioned dispute those interpretations, deny involvement in particular episodes, or offer different accounts. And as I write, there is no definitive court ruling that lets us turn the whole thing into a ready-made verdict. This is not legal hair-splitting; it is the kind of distinction that tends to disappear when politics hits the internet and everyone gets fifteen seconds to become a federal prosecutor.

The party, however, did take place. A report by the Brazilian magazine piauí, based on messages in the police report, described the division of labor: former cabinet minister Fábio Faria appears handling the male guests and event promoter Tiago Polo the women. The conversations mention Brazilian senators Davi Alcolumbre and Rodrigo Pacheco and Supreme Court justice Dias Toffoli, among others. Being mentioned in a conversation does not prove attendance, and all three denied going. Faria, for his part, told piauí that his involvement was limited to sending invitations.

There was also a very contemporary rule for a party meant to stay discreet: cellphones were left at the entrance. The plan worked so well that, years later, we are reading messages about the party’s arrangements on the host’s seized phone. Technology has a sense of humor.

A Party and a Much Less Exciting Word

The description draws attention because of the public officials, the luxury, the ratio of guests, and, naturally, the 120 women. But set aside the glamour, the DJs, the money, the positions of authority, and the potential legal trouble for a few minutes. What remains is a familiar human activity:

networking.

Career books have recommended it for decades, courses teach it, consultants repeat it, and LinkedIn has turned the practice into digital infrastructure. Meet people, build relationships, get out there, be remembered.

An employee knows someone at another company. That acquaintance works closely with HR. Months later, a job opens up, and before the posting reaches hundreds of applicants, a message travels through the network:

“I thought of you. They’re looking for someone with your background.”

Nothing necessarily wrong has happened. Something good may have happened: information circulated, someone found an opportunity, a company found an employee.

Now add a closer connection. The employee personally knows the hiring manager. They have worked together and trust each other. Should that trust count? Probably. How much? What if another applicant is technically stronger but unknown? What if friendship carries more weight than competence? What if trust stops being trust and becomes favoritism? At what point does a legitimate network of relationships cross an ethical boundary, and at what point does it cross a legal one?

There is no single answer. There are contexts, rules, duties, conflicts of interest, and different degrees of power. But notice the progression: we started with a routine career tip and, without changing the relational nature of the scene, arrived at merit, influence, privilege, and power.

Now replace the employee with a banker, the HR manager with politicians, public officials, business leaders, and people who can influence institutional decisions, and the job opening with decisions that can affect banks, regulations, investigations, contracts, and billions of dollars. The dynamic does not become alien. What changes dramatically is the scale, and with it the consequences and obligations.

Understanding What Changes as the Network Grows

To see what a network of relationships can mean when it involves business leaders, public officials, institutions, and vast resources, we need two subjects: politics and economics. We are not going to turn this article into an introductory course in either; just enough to return to the party and see more clearly what initially looked like a guest list. Let’s start with politics.

Politics Begins Long Before Government

When we hear “politics,” we picture Congress, parties, elections, corruption, the Supreme Court, and left and right arguing as if the planet’s survival depended on who shouts the loudest. All of that is politics, but politics predates the buildings where we institutionalize it. At an elementary level, it appears whenever people need to organize life together, decisions, resources, rules, interests, and power. A family does it. So do a company, a neighborhood association, a church, and a university. Even a conversation at a bar takes on a small political dimension when it stops being an exchange of ideas and starts involving persuasion, reputation, alliances, and a contest over whose interpretation the group will accept.

That does not make an argument about football equivalent to a Senate vote. Different things can share a dynamic without becoming equivalent.

What these situations have in common is that people do not enter relationships with the same capabilities. In a family, one person has formal authority over a decision, another knows more about the subject, a third controls the necessary resource, and a fourth is simply much more persuasive. The same thing happens in the institutional world on a far larger scale: money, office, information, reputation, and access are different capabilities, and relationships can bring them together.

This is where the party becomes more than extravagant. Imagine the same celebration organized by an unknown person with no substantial wealth, institutional position, or special connections. It is reasonable to suppose that senators, cabinet ministers, and highly sought-after business leaders would have fewer reasons to rearrange their schedules. Now look at the other side: a banker does not assemble that kind of guest list by drawing names at random from a phone book either.

People seek relationships because relationships produce something: companionship, affection, fun, information, opportunity, prestige, access, business, influence. Not every interest is financial, hidden, or illegitimate. Sometimes we just want to be near someone we like, and that is already an interest. But when those involved have resources, positions of authority, information, and access, what each can offer changes in scale.

Economic power can make a relationship attractive to someone with political, institutional, social, or informational power. And someone with economic power may have a strong interest in knowing who can open channels, provide information, make decisions, introduce other people, or answer a call they would not take from a stranger.

None of this requires a conspiracy; it is recognizable human behavior. The questions come next: how far does this exchange of capabilities remain a social relationship? When does it become favoritism, create a conflict of interest, or cross an ethical boundary—and, in some cases, a legal one?

The party alone does not answer those questions, but it makes it impossible to pretend that who is in the room means nothing.

Economics Also Begins Before Markets

Economics has the same image problem: we hear the word and picture interest rates, inflation, central banks, charts, and someone saying “yield curve” with a confidence that makes us pretend we understand. But it begins earlier than that. Resources are limited, desires are not, and choices have to be made. A family decides whether to replace the car or remodel the house. A child splits a bag of cookies with a sibling and discovers that resource distribution can produce social instability in under thirty seconds. A company decides whether to hire or automate; a government decides where to tax and where to spend. At different scales, we find scarcity, preferences, exchange, production, distribution, risk, and incentives.

Centuries of thought turned these questions into sophisticated systems. Adam Smith investigated markets, specialization, and economic coordination; Marx, capital, labor, property, and class conflict; Keynes, among other things, aggregate demand and the role of public intervention in certain crises; Hayek, dispersed knowledge and the problems of concentrating economic decisions.

It would be absurd to reduce any of them to a kitchen-table budget. But it would be equally curious to imagine that the kitchen stopped operating under economic constraints because it had not yet read Keynes. Scientific complexity expands the analysis; it does not create the elementary phenomenon it analyzes out of nothing.

Politics and Economics Don’t Walk Hand in Hand

People say politics and economics go hand in hand. I like the intention, but the image is still too timid: it suggests two independent things that decided to take a stroll together. In practice, they run through each other. Businesses depend on laws, contracts, infrastructure, currency, institutional stability, and regulatory decisions. Governments depend on tax revenue, production, credit, employment, and investment. Companies depend on workers and consumers. Investors want to protect capital, business owners want predictability and opportunities, workers want income and security, consumers want price, quality, and availability, and public officials operate within rules, responsibilities, and institutional pressures. These interests can align, compete, or shift depending on the issue.

Back to the party. The people there were not abstract individuals, but people occupying different positions in economic, political, and institutional networks. A banker’s interest in someone with political access need not be identical to that person’s interest in a banker, and it is precisely this difference that makes the relationship relevant.

Networking does not erase distinct interests; it creates a channel through which they can meet. Relationships are channels through which information, trust, influence, opportunities, and interests circulate.

When Networks Become Enormous

So far, we have discussed relationships between people, but economic networks also connect organizations. Some are so large that they create a curious impression: the same names appear in many places.

Try it yourself; you do not have to take my word for it. Open a financial information site that shows ownership of publicly traded companies; Investing.com is one option. Start with Nestlé: https://br.investing.com/equities/nestle-ag-ownership. On this Portuguese-language page, look for Informações → Acionistas → Principais acionistas institucionais (information → shareholders → top institutional shareholders). Then repeat the exercise with Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Pfizer, or another major publicly traded company and compare the names.

One caution: a search may show companies, subsidiaries, or securities with similar names. Before comparing, confirm the full name, country, exchange, and ticker, and look for the main company or holding company of the group you want to investigate. Some names will start appearing again.

The exercise is more useful than saying “everything belongs to everyone,” which would be catchy and bad. Companies are indeed deeply connected through capital markets, funds, banks, asset managers, suppliers, customers, boards, investors, and supply chains. But distinctions matter. An asset manager is not necessarily the ultimate economic beneficiary of the assets it manages. Owning shares does not mean running a company single-handedly. Managing trillions of dollars for others does not mean owning those trillions. And an index fund does not operate like a corporate monarch issuing daily orders to the companies in its portfolio.

BlackRock, Vanguard, and the Problem with “Owner”

BlackRock and Vanguard are among the world’s largest asset managers. Their funds appear as shareholders in thousands of companies because they manage resources for investors, retirement funds, institutions, and ordinary people. Ask who owns a company and you may find funds; ask who is behind them and you will find management structures, fund investors, institutional investors, and, in many cases, millions of ultimate beneficiaries. The word “owner” loses its simplicity.

Vanguard has an unusual structure: the company is owned by its funds, which are economically owned by their investors. BlackRock is a publicly traded company with its own shareholders. But it would be naive to conclude that large asset managers therefore have no influence. They participate in shareholder votes, engage with companies, and operate in regulated environments. This is where governance, transparency, conflicts of interest, lobbying, and legal boundaries come in.

The point for this inquiry is simpler: concentrated resources create a capacity to act; that capacity can produce influence.

Influence is not absolute control, but it is not nothing either.

The Same Dynamic, on Another Scale

Networking does not disappear when we leave business or financial markets. States build relationships too. Presidents travel, prime ministers receive delegations, foreign ministers organize meetings, business leaders join official missions, and countries take part in forums, alliances, treaties, and multilateral organizations. Heads of state have dinner together, talk privately, and build channels that may prove useful when a crisis arises. We call this diplomacy.

It is not the same thing as a banker’s private party. But some elementary dynamics reappear: access, trust, the flow of information, reciprocity, interests, and the capacity to influence. Different things can share a dynamic without becoming equivalent. That is why looking at other scales helps: not to say that a party, a company, and diplomatic negotiations are the same thing, but to recognize relationships that recur under completely different institutions, rules, and consequences.

The Party Got More Crowded

After moving through politics, economics, major companies, investors, and relationships between institutions, we can return to the 120 women and 20 men. The party has not changed; we have changed the lens.

At the start, there was an extravagant story involving a banker, public officials mentioned in messages, banned cellphones, and a guest ratio that would make any statistician ask what the experimental hypothesis was. Now the room seems more crowded, though no one has entered: the same scene also reveals a network of contacts, access, reputation, information, trust, economic interests, institutional positions, and different forms of power.

This does not resolve the investigation. Legally, what matters is what actually happened through those relationships. But who is in the room matters precisely because relationships are channels: opportunities, information, trust, influence, and interests can circulate through them. Most of the time, building those channels is simply social life. As the scale grows, more can circulate through those channels, and the consequences and obligations grow as well.

So perhaps the more useful question is not:

“Who knows whom?”

But:

“What circulates through this relationship, what capabilities does it connect, and what happens when the scale increases?”