Brazil Insurance Jewellery Basic Need 18

Brazil Insurance Jewellery Basic Need. 

By Aamir Mannan

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On the night of Saturday, August 27, precisely at 11:50 p.m., 12 men in gray uniforms entered one of São Paulo’s most highly secured buildings, the Banco Itaú‘s bank branch located on Paulista Avenue, the very financial and business heart of Brazil’s biggest metropolis. They passed through the security check at the bank’s underground parkade by identifying themselves as furnishing workers – a perfect disguise, since the branch was under renovations and the guards at the building had been previously warned about people coming in that night. Without firing a single shot, they spent the following 10 hours breaking into some 170 private strongboxes belonging to at least 120 

wealthy clients of Banco Itaú, Latin America’s largest bank by market value. Only two security guards were disarmed, the first when the thieves seized the ground floor where the entrance door to the branch was opened, so the other members of the team could enter; and the other when he arrived in the morning for his work shift.  Five other men spent the whole night outside, to keep the rest of the pack aware of any possible casualties, should something have gone wrong.

Photos: Global High Performers

On the next morning, the thieves left with cash, luxury watches, gold bars, sapphires, emeralds, rubies and diamonds. Loads of diamonds. According to the most optimistic estimates, the total amount of valuables taken was about R$ 100 million ($58.5 million). Little of the loot was insured (banks don’t usually ask their customers about the contents of their safety deposit boxes,) and much of it appeared difficult to trace. Banco Itaú only guarantees the compensation of R$ 15.000,00 ($8,800) per deposit box. Those whose valuables are worth up to R$ 200.000,00 ($117,000) can opt for an insurance plan provided by the bank. If the amount to be secured is higher than that, an external insurance company must be hired for the service. Most clients, however, never thought of being ripped off in such a way.

Among the victims who did not have insurance is Therezinha Maluf Chamma, the 82-year-old sister of the legally troubled former State Governor of São Paulo, Paulo Salim Maluf. For more than 30 years, Chamma kept hers and her daughters’ jewellery in two deposit boxes at the Banco Itaú branch. Everything was stolen, including a diamond necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels and a ring encrusted with a diamond of the size of a big cherry. The family’s loss was R$ 1 million ($585,000) or more. Two collections of luxury watches were also taken, one of which contained 143 Rolex watches worth more than R$ 2 million ($1,170,000). Another client lost two jewellery cases, one being an 18th Century Prussian jewellery case studded with rubies, and made of silver and ivory, which sheltered inside a collection of 33 rough diamonds extracted from African and Brazilian mines. The other was a wooden box decorated with silver containing 58 Colombian emeralds in its interior, in sizes varying from 1 to 3 carats. Together, the boxes are worth R$ 12 million ($7 million).

Due to the amazingness of the situation, one should expect that the police would take immediate action. But that’s not what happened at all. In spite of being prompt informed by Banco Itaú about the crime, the police department responsible for handling bank robberies in São Paulo only began to investigate the case a week after it took place. Even the security guards who worked that night were interrogated only 11 days after the robbery, not to mention that investigators didn’t do much during the time known as the ‘Golden 48,’ in reference to the relevance of collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses during the 48 hours after a crime is committed, a period after which the likelihood of solving it drops precipitously.

There’s already suspicion of self-dealing in a fishy deal between key members of the investigation team and the thieves, especially because the São Paulo police has a history in this regard. In the past, some of its officials extorted money from Colombian drug lords, including Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, and also from burglars responsible for several bank thefts over the past years.

Because of that, a lot of the victims are hiring private investigation agencies such as the New York-based RCI First Security and Intelligence Advising, which already contacted hundreds of cutters, jewellers, auctioneers and money changers from all over the globe in order to locate some of the stolen goods. The fact that the investigations were delayed, though, is a major problem. Timing is crucial in these cases, since the thieves will always try to go away as soon as possible to avoid being tracked down.

As soon as they heard the shocking news of the robbery, the directors of Banco Itaú set up a crisis committee to monitor the situation and make an exhaustive assessment of the consequences of this unprecedented theft, which, for some reason, only became public last week. For a bank, a huge robbery like the one in this case can somehow be compared to a plane crash for an airliner. Some 40 managers at the bank were ordered to put aside their daily tasks and devote to personally inform clients that their precious goods had been stolen. Many have had to be medicated after receiving the news.

Meanwhile, investigators are trying to identify the thieves thanks to the only clue they have left: Although they’ve destroyed much of the surveillance system, some of the security cameras went unnoticed to them. Based on the video footage, 12 thieves have been identified so far. And it is quite likely that the mentors of the Banco Itaú burglary are the same behind the Banco Central burglary at Fortaleza, one of the world’s largest burglaries.

On the weekend of August 6, 2005 and August 7, 2005 a gang of burglars tunneled into the Banco Central in Fortaleza, a city in north-eastern Brazil. They removed five containers of R$ 50 notes, with an estimated value of R$ 164,755,150 ($95 million) and weighing about 3.5 tons. The money was uninsured; a bank spokeswoman stated that the risks were too small to justify the insurance premiums. The burglars managed to evade or disable the bank’s internal alarms and sensors; the burglary remained undiscovered until the bank opened for business on the morning of Monday, August 8, 2005. So far, authorities have recovered more than $8.93 million, while the remaining is still unaccounted for.

The Banco Central robbery inspired a just-released movie that is already a contender for representing Brazil at the 2012 Academy Awards. The question is whether a possible sequel of the movie will have a happy ending for the victims or the thieves.