Quick Facts
Biography
Daniel Valente Dantas is a Brazilian banker and financier. He is known as the founder of the Opportunity Asset Management
Career
In the late 1990s, Dantas was a fund manager for Citigroup and a key figure in the privatization of the telecoms sector. His company controlled Brasil Telecom Participacoes, then one of the country's largest telecoms groups, together with Citigroup (C.N) and Telecom Italia (TLIT.MI). The Opportunity Group led an international private sector partnership that bought up a large chunk of the Brazilian telecoms sector in 1997, when this sector was privatized.
- Operation Satyagraha
In July 2008, several TrueCrypt-Encrypted hard drives were seized from Daniel Dantas, who was suspected of financial crimes. The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months (without success) to obtain access to TrueCrypt-protected disks owned by the banker, after which they enlisted the help of the FBI.
On June 7, 2011 the National Council of Justice (CNJ) unanimously recognized that Judge Fausto de Sanctis, at the time the head judge of the 6th Criminal Court of São Paulo, intentionally disobeyed the orders of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), when he ordered the detention of Daniel Dantas in Operation Satyagraha. The judges of the CNJ followed the vote of reporting Judge Morgana Richa, who determined that De Sanctis’s conduct is incompatible with that of a judge, and that he would only escape proper punishment through the lack of a legal provision.
Also on the 7th June 2011, the Higher Court of Justice (STJ) accepted the opinion of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and voided the criminal action originating from Operation Satyagraha, for its irregularities. According to the President of the 5th Bench of the Higher Court of Justice, Jorge Mussi, "the involvement of ABIN (Brazilian Intelligence Agency) was demonstrated in a document in which the Federal Police ordered the internal investigation of irregularities in the operation". The scheme of informal investigation set up in Satyagraha represents, for Mussi, "a model of investigation more suited to the secret police, beyond the most basic rules of the Democratic State of Law".
On 2016, he was found to be innocent from all charges related to Operation Satyagraha.
- Conviction
Dantas was arrested twice by Protógenes Queiroz, a police officer who investigated Daniel Dantas's involvement in Operation Satyagraha, in early July 2008, but each time was released almost immediately. The President of the Supreme Court Gilmar Mendes gave Dantas two habeas corpus rulings in less than two days.
On December 2, 2008 Daniel Dantas was convicted of an attempt to bribe police officers related to an investigation into money laundering. He appealed against the conviction. Daniel Dantas was finally convicted to ten years imprisonment in December 2008 for attempting to bribe a police officer.