Guests were abuzz when a giant yacht arrived at the 2024 wedding of Brazilian lawmaker Ciro Nogueira’s daughter. On board was Daniel Vorcaro, the chief executive officer of a fast-growing firm called Banco Master.

As he hobnobbed with Brazil’s political and corporate elite, Vorcaro became known for his ostentatious displays of wealth, with a taste for private planes and lavish parties. Then his devices were seized in early November in a police investigation into alleged fraud at the bank, igniting speculation in São Paulo, Brasília and Rio de Janeiro over whose names would be found in his contact list.

In the ensuing weeks, the local press has carried nearly daily installments linking Vorcaro to other investors, public servants, lawmakers and even governors. The plane flight of a Supreme Court justice to a football match has invited scrutiny of an institution once viewed as a bastion against corruption. Comparisons to the Carwash bribery scandal that rocked Brazil a decade ago are becoming more frequent.

At the center of it all is Vorcaro, who until a few years ago was just a peripheral figure in Brazil’s high society.

Nogueira, Vorcaro, de Jesus, Cajado and Castro didn’t respond to requests for comment. A representative for the Supreme Court declined to comment on Toffoli’s behalf. A spokesperson for Rocha said Banco de Brasília has hired an audit firm while the police investigation proceeds. Costa’s press officer denied that the minister has a relationship with Vorcaro.

The sheer scale of Vorcaro’s connections across Brazil signifies that no side is immune to scrutiny, said Marco Antonio Teixeira, a political science professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, a business school.

“There’s no escape for any side of the political spectrum,” he said. “Everyone has something to lose.”

Vorcaro was arrested on Nov. 17 as he tried to board a private jet from São Paulo to Dubai and later released with an ankle monitor. The central bank is overseeing the company’s liquidation process as the Federal Police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office continue to look into Vorcaro’s multiple businesses. Master’s liquidation could cost the fund, known as FGC, as much as 55 billion reais, Bloomberg reported earlier. That amount will probably have to be replenished by Brazil’s biggest banks. In recent weeks, scrutiny in the Brazilian press has focused most intensely on Toffoli, the Supreme Court justice. He took control of the Master probe last year after a defense lawyer argued that the police work could affect individuals with parliamentary immunity.

(One of the documents found in a search of Vorcaro’s home was a real estate transaction in the name of a federal lawmaker. Although the document was unrelated to the Master investigation, Toffoli ruled it was enough to establish that “any legal action must be evaluated beforehand by this court and no longer by the lower court.”)

Earlier this month, newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that investment funds linked to Master bought shares of a hotel resort in Paraná that then belonged to two of the justice’s brothers. Vorcaro’s brother-in-law, Fabiano Zettel, owns funds that bought part of the Toffoli’s brothers stake in the hotel in 2021.

The appearance of a conflict from such family ties, along with the Peru football trip, has caused an uproar in the local press. Other justices and senior officials have privately discussed ways to address the situation, including trying to persuade Toffoli to take a temporary leave of absence from the bench on health grounds, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity. This month, Toffoli authorized a new wave of police searches. Even then, he required physical evidence to be held by the prosecutor’s office rather than by police, further complicating the investigation.

Toffoli also scheduled a hearing in which Vorcaro would have appeared face-to-face with Central Bank Supervision Director Ailton de Aquino in a “clarification” hearing, over the objections of the attorney general. Eventually, Toffoli partially backed off and left Aquino out of the hearing. Under pressure to provide transparency to the case, Toffoli lifted secrecy on the hearings on Thursday, nearly a month later.

Toffoli was focusing on the central bank at around the same time Jhonatan de Jesus, a judge on Brazil’s audit court, signaled he would review the regulator’s move to liquidate Banco Master. It was an unprecedented move by officials at the country’s highest courts to call in question the central bank’s exclusive jurisdiction. The nation’s biggest banks rallied to the central bank’s defense, saying its independence is vital.

But even before Banco Master was liquidated, politicians linked to Vorcaro were proposing changes that would have undermined the central bank’s autonomy.

Most prominent among them was Nogueira, whose daughter’s wedding Vorcaro attended. He’s one of the leaders of Centrão, the most influential bloc in Congress. Before Master’s collapse he tried unsuccessfully to quadruple the maximum amount of guarantees for bank deposits to 1 million reais ($192,000). Rivals in Congress accusingly referred to it as the “Master Amendment” since it would have helped bolster the products marketed by the bank as insured investments.

Nogueira, who was former President Jair Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, frequented many of the same social engagements as Vorcaro — a glitzy party at Cipriani Broadway in New York, a website launch event in São Paulo, a business forum in Rome where they sat side-by-side on a panel on attracting investment. Nogueira’s contacts were on Vorcaro’s phone when it was seized late last year, O Globo reported.

Vorcaro remains in São Paulo, and his phone and other devices remain police evidence as the investigation continues. That means that Brasília’s political class won’t be able to put the Master case behind it, with presidential and legislative elections just months away.