The former secretary will return a luxury watch received from the government

Guilherme Seto

Former Secretary of the Ministry of Economy Caio Megale told Folha de S.Paulo that he will return the luxury Cartier watch he won during an official visit to Doha, Qatar in October 2019.

Megal, currently XP’s chief economist, wrote a letter to the Ministry of Finance this Monday (6) asking for information on the procedures he would need to take to divest the facility.

The watch was presented to him at his office in Brazil by the Assistant to the President of the Republic in early December 2019, one month after the trip.

After receiving the object, Megal contacted the Public Ethics Commission of the Presidency to find out if he could keep the gift. Cartier watches are worth tens of thousands of reals.

Last year, the commission informed that the object does not need to be returned. However, the economist claims that he chose not to use the watch, which was kept in its original packaging.

Last Wednesday (1st), the Federal Court of Auditors put the Ethics Commission on notice and said that receiving expensive gifts was outside public “principles of prudence and morality”.

In addition to Megale, former Bolsonaro ministers Gilson Machado (Tourism), Osmar Terra (Citizenship), Ernesto Araujo (Foreign Relations) and the former president of Apex (Brazil’s trade and investment promotion agency) also received watches during the same trip. Sergio Segovia Barbosa.

The topic was brought to the fore by the revelation published in a report by the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo that in October 2021, a military man advising the then minister Bento Albuquerque (Minas e Energia) tried to land in Brazil with a number of luxuries. backpack items believed to be gifts from the Saudi Arabian government to Jair Bolsonaro and former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro.

Since the goods were not declared, they were seized by the Federal Revenue Department, whose team of auditors valued the goods at 3 million euros (about 16.5 million rials).