At the top of Folha's list on Monday was not the investigation but the person inside it. Roberta Luchsinger, the businesswoman being investigated over alleged lobbying involving President Lula's eldest son, Fábio Luís Lula da Silva — known as Lulinha — says she is receiving threats on social media and intends to ask for an investigation into the posts. One message told her that her face had its days numbered. What alarmed her about that one, the column reports, is that the person who wrote it posts photographs with a superior-court judge said to be a relative.
Four places further down the same list is the document. Federal police investigators, in the material that supported opening an inquiry into Lulinha, say Luchsinger used her driver to make significant movements of cash. On 25 June last year, they say, the driver made two cash collections from an unidentified third party, of 100,000 and 200,000 reais. The messages Folha quotes are domestic in tone: tell me when you've got the money; I've just picked it all up, I'm taking it to your house, I didn't count it because it's in sealed packets; 100 plus 200. She asked him to put 50,000 into her consultancy's account and 50,000 into a travel agency's. He sent a photograph of a wardrobe and said the rest was behind the clothes.
The travel agency had issued tickets for her and Lulinha. On the same day, the police say, 2,000 reais of tickets were bought through it for the two of them, Brasília to Congonhas in São Paulo. She also sent the driver a screenshot of the boarding pass for the flight she would take with Lulinha, saying they would come in through the authorities' entrance at half past four, and asking him to be there.
By August of that year, in a conversation transcribed by the police, she said she could not keep paying for tickets because she was already spending 100,000 reais a month on a house used by Lulinha. That exchange was first published by O Estado de S. Paulo and confirmed by Folha. The police document does not name the house; Folha notes she rented one in Brasília that was also used by him, according to a labour claim brought against her.
Poder360, working from the same inquiry through reporters at the magazine VEJA and confirming it independently, adds the shape investigators think they see: a group of three — Luchsinger, Lulinha and the businessman Fernando Bittar, once a co-owner of the Atibaia property that featured in Lava Jato — acting to intermediate private interests before federal bodies, which the police call a permanent and coordinated core. In one message Lulinha asks whether they have the money for a trip to Africa and tells her she is the one who looks after his finances; Poder360 says she organised and paid for it, at 20,000 dollars a head. Investigators also suspect payments to her consultancy were ultimately meant for him — in one message a figure known as Careca do INSS refers to the possible beneficiary only as the man's son — and that the group looked into opening companies and accounts in countries that are hard to trace. The inquiry began with a court-authorised breach of her electronic records.
Both deny it. Lulinha's lawyer, Marco Aurélio de Carvalho, told Folha that parts of the police were being used for electoral purposes to interfere in the 2026 elections, that nothing in the record proves the cash paid for the tickets, and that the whole thing is a jigsaw of inferences of the kind last seen under Lava Jato. He told Poder360 his client has no connection to the activities under investigation and is a target because of his surname. Luchsinger's lawyers said they would not comment on conversations supposedly taken from a sealed report.
The inquiry covers suspected corruption and influence peddling, including an attempt to sell medicinal cannabis business to the Health Ministry that did not succeed, and is before the supreme court justice André Mendonça. Lulinha is the subject of two other inquiries at the same court. President Lula is not under investigation in this case.
Why it is on the board
Top of Folha's most-read list when we collected, with the police document itself at fifth on the same list.
Which of the two is read more is the thing worth recording. The document is the news; the column about the threats is the item Brazilian readers opened first. Both are Folha's, published the same day, four places apart.
확인: Folha de S.Paulo · Poder360