Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing frontrunner in Brazil's presidential election, was entertained on a speedboat in Brasília by businessmen seeking a Covid-19 vaccine contract in 2020, at a party attended by call girls where he was given a Rolex watch, according to an investigation published four days before the October 25 runoff against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The bombshell report by Piauí, a Brazilian monthly magazine, alleges that the senator spent the afternoon of July 17 2020 on Lake Paranoá with executives from Precisa Medicamentos, which was then trying to sell Brazil's government the Covaxin vaccine developed by India's Bharat Biotech. Brazil recorded more than 1,100 Covid deaths that day while Jair Bolsonaro, the senator’s father and then president, repeatedly dismissed the threat posed by the virus.
The allegations come as the race is too close to call. A Quaest poll published on October 21, after the candidates’ October 18 first heated debate, put Flávio Bolsonaro on 45% and Lula on 44%, down from a 46% to 44% lead a week earlier and within the two-point margin of error.
Flávio Bolsonaro had not commented by the time of publication, Piauí said.
According to the magazine, Danilo Trento, Precisa's institutional director, and Francisco Maximiano, its owner, flew from São Paulo to Brasília the night before with a travel agent and three women brought along for the occasion. The private jet had previously been used by Daniel Vorcaro, the jailed former owner of Banco Master, whose collapse has become the dominant corruption scandal of the campaign.
Piauí said it reconstructed the outing from interviews with an unnamed person who was on board, as well as pilots, parliamentary aides and a former congressman, and from financial and phone records obtained by congressional inquiries. It alleges that the senator went below deck with more than one of the women and that, once the boat had docked, Trento took the Rolex off his own wrist and put it on the senator's.
Trento cut off contact when told the details of the story, the magazine said. Maximiano's lawyers did not respond to its requests for comment.
The Covaxin deal became the centrepiece of a 2021 Senate inquiry into the Bolsonaro government's handling of the pandemic. The contract priced doses at BRL80, against about BRL56 offered by Pfizer and BRL18 by AstraZeneca. It was cancelled before any payment was made after a health ministry official raised concerns. The inquiry's final report recommended charges against 78 people, including Flávio Bolsonaro, Trento and Maximiano.
At the time, the senator defended Precisa. He later dismissed the affair, saying: "It's the first time in my life I've seen a misappropriation of public funds where not a single real was paid."
Piauí also reported that three months after the boat trip, the senator arranged and joined a video call between Maximiano and Gustavo Montezano, then head of the state development bank BNDES, to discuss financing for a new telecoms venture. BNDES said at the time that no financing was agreed. For his part, Flávio Bolsonaro said he had no "commercial or financial relationship" with Maximiano.
Brian Winter, analyst and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, described the report as "the long-rumoured piece of anti-Flávio kompromat" expected in the final days of the race. But he doubted it would shift the outcome on its own, arguing that "long magazine articles are not what move voters in 2026".
The bigger risk for the right-wing senator, according to Winter, lay in the October 23 final televised debate, where Lula will likely press him to deny the report. The race could turn if video or images of the outing surfaced, with Flávio Bolsonaro floating that possibility during the campaign.
The senator already faces a series of investigations. In May, leaked messages published by The Intercept Brasil showed he had negotiated up to $24mn from Vorcaro to fund a biopic of his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is in jail after being convicted of plotting a coup following his 2022 defeat to Lula. Flávio Bolsonaro said the funding was a private sponsorship and that no favours were exchanged. Federal police are also investigating him for suspected money laundering linked to lawyer Willer Tomaz, according to reports on October 19. He denies wrongdoing in both cases.
In September, the news site PlatôBR reported that the senator had received a separate Rolex, worth BRL305,000 ($60,000), bought by a lawyer who lobbied authorities in Brasília.
Earlier scandals show that revelations can hurt him, at least temporarily. After the film-funding disclosures in May, an AtlasIntel/Bloomberg survey showed Lula moving from narrowly behind to a lead of about seven points. Political analyst Lula Guimarães told the AP at the time that the damage would have been greater had the allegations surfaced closer to election day. Flávio Bolsonaro eventually recovered and topped the October 4 first round with 47.03% of valid votes against Lula's 45.16%.
The seasoned leftist incumbent, meanwhile, has his own headaches on corruption. Lula spent 19 months in prison on corruption and money-laundering convictions that were later annulled. His eldest son, Fábio Luís Lula da Silva, is under federal police investigation over alleged influence peddling linked to health ministry dealings, and is also caught up in a pension-fraud inquiry. He denies wrongdoing, and Lula has said he will not shield him. In June, Jaques Wagner, a close ally, stepped down as the Workers’ Party leader in the Senate after the Supreme Court accused him of taking payments and an apartment worth more than $1mn in exchange for defending Banco Master’s interests in Congress.
Analysts have argued that Brazil's deep polarisation makes committed voters unlikely to switch sides over corruption claims, and that disillusionment is more likely to keep voters at home. Abstention reached 21% in the first round on October 4, the highest since 1998, despite compulsory voting.
A BBC News Brasil poll aggregator puts Flávio Bolsonaro on 46% and Lula on 44%, with their likely ranges of support overlapping. Investors have broadly backed the senator as more likely to rein in public spending, and the Ibovespa index jumped 7.7% to a record after his first-round lead.