Americanas investigation should be completed in less than six months

The Americanas investigation process should take less than six months to complete, according to sources with knowledge of the process. The committee must work to ensure that the investigation does not last for too long, given the seriousness of the case.

Market sources also say that it is already taken for granted that the billionaire gap is not an error, but an accounting fraud.

It is possible to say that this is a fraud because the omitted amounts did not appear as debts, they only entered the balance sheet in the so-called supplier account. The problem is that a debt with a supplier does not charge interest, while a debt with a bank does. Therefore, interest was omitted and values ​​appeared more positively on the balance sheet.

Thus, the company did not show leverage as high as it actually had, which in itself would be serious.

However, the case was even more serious. When a company pays interest on debts, that money comes out of cash and affects the result, which is reflected in the Statement of Income for the Year (DRE). However, instead of including interest in order to affect the result, interest was included against the supplier account.

In other words, the value that should be entered as negative, entered as positive in the balance sheet. One hypothesis that arises about the motivation behind the fraud is that due to the fact that the company has bonuses linked to results, within the “owner culture”, the less debts appear and the better the DRE, the higher the remuneration received.

What the investigation will determine is how much was skilfully omitted and how much was not so that the culprits could be identified. The more skillful the schema articulators have been, the less involved the case must have been.

The investigation should show the extent of the involvement, which may be restricted to insiders or involve board members and even third parties, such as creditors, audits.