By Miguel do Rosário

Here is what the lobbyist of the mega-tariff, Paulo Figueiredo, does not tell you in his livestreams: his company in the United States, International Treasure Group, was convicted by the American Justice system. The ruling was issued last October, by default, by a federal judge in Connecticut: to return $140,000 (about R$ 770,000), plus interest, to the victims of one of the biggest scams in recent US history.

International Treasure Group is a Florida consulting firm of which Figueiredo is the sole owner — and which operated out of his own home. The money it will have to return came from one of the dozens of shell companies that Chinese fraudster Miles Guo used to hide stolen assets.

And it was not just his company. Gettr — the social network that hired Figueiredo’s firm — was convicted in the same scandal to return much more: $21 million (about R$ 115 million) that it received from the same shell companies.

At the time, Gettr was run by Jason Miller, today the most aggressive anti-Brazil operator in the Trumpist world in Washington. No newspaper, Brazilian or American, had reported on Gettr’s conviction until now.

The two sentences stem from Miles Guo’s bankruptcy. The Chinese billionaire was sentenced in June to 30 years in prison for a fraud of over $1 billion (about R$ 5.5 billion) against the anti-communist Chinese diaspora.

Guo’s scam worked like this: in daily livestreams, he presented himself as the great enemy of the Chinese Communist Party and asked his followers to “invest” in the crusade. He sold everything — shares in his media network, memberships to a private luxury club, his own cryptocurrency.

One of the best-selling products was a promise: 5% of Gettr. Guo offered his livestream audience pieces of the social network, as if the platform were his — and it was, although officially Gettr swore independence.

Thousands of families fell for it. According to the American Justice system, the money from these victims turned into a luxury yacht, a mansion in New Jersey, and a fleet of sports cars — and Guo continued to run scams even from prison, broadcasting livestreams through Gettr itself.

It is this stolen money that the American Justice system is now recovering, pocket by pocket. Two of those pockets led to Brazil.

Let’s return to the Brazilian. Figueiredo ignored the lawsuit against his company for over a year — and his lawyer dropped the case in 2024 because he wasn’t paid.

His formal defense only manifested itself in December 2025, after the conviction, to ask for the annulment of the sentence. The excuses were given in writing and under oath.

The first: the company’s mail was kept in a “common area” of the house, “like the entrance or the kitchen,” and could be picked up “by me, my current wife, or even my ex-wife.” The second: he was too busy, with long stints in Washington and “serious legal and personal security problems” linked to his political activities in Brazil.

The particularly ironic aspect: Figueiredo’s justification for ignoring the American Justice system is that he was busy articulating, in Washington, sanctions against his own country.

The excuse carries the same cynicism used by Eduardo Bolsonaro, his partner in the anti-Brazilian crusades. In the lawsuit for coercion of Justice currently in the Supreme Federal Court (STF), Eduardo contested the way he was notified — even though he gave interviews demonstrating he was perfectly aware of the process.

The judge heard both sides in February. The outcome of the appeal could be published at any moment.

The Contract of the Crime

To defend himself, Figueiredo committed his biggest Freudian slip: he handed over, himself, what he had denied for four years. He attached to the lawsuit the documents proving his work for Gettr.

O Cafezinho analyzed the complete package — and the contract is unprecedented in the press. Signed in August 2021, it guaranteed Figueiredo’s company a fixed salary of $35,000 per month.

Four months, four payments: exactly the $140,000 of the conviction. On the signature page, two handwritten names: Paulo Figueiredo — and Jason Miller, CEO of Gettr.

The attached internal reports show what the money was for: deploying Gettr into the heart of Brazilian politics, on the eve of the 2022 election.

The platform bought advertising space in Bolsonarist media outlets. Jovem Pan, Gazeta do Povo, and the 4×4 channel appear nominally in the documents as recipients of payments.

It sponsored events for Eduardo Bolsonaro and Carlos Jordy. Jordy is today one of the main figures of Bolsonarism in Rio de Janeiro, tipped for the Senate by the PL party — after Flávio Bolsonaro left for the family’s presidential project and Cláudio Castro was ousted under suspicions of corruption.

Gettr also funded the broadcast of a medical congress on “early treatment” [for COVID-19], in the middle of the pandemic. And it commissioned a presidential poll with a pre-arranged rule: if the result was bad for Bolsonaro, the poll would be shelved.

A Dirty Record Before Exile

Figueiredo’s record was already dirty — very dirty — before his self-exile in the United States. And the beginning of the story has a familiar name: Trump.

In 2013, at age 29, Figueiredo signed with the Trump Organization the licensing for the Trump Hotel Rio, in Barra da Tijuca — the first of the brand in South America. He liked to tell people he met Trump on a golf course in Florida.

Trump didn’t put a dollar into the business: he just rented the name. The real money came from where it always comes in these schemes — from pension funds, which injected about R$ 247 million into the hotel’s investment fund.

According to a complaint by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, the contributions were unlocked through bribes. About R$ 40 million were allegedly paid to councilors and directors of the BRB bank to approve the investments without technical analysis.

And Figueiredo’s role, according to prosecutors, was not decorative: as president of the hotel company, it was up to him to authorize the bribe payments and sign contracts with fake invoices to generate cash. The bank’s shortfall: R$ 348 million.

The hotel opened hastily for the 2016 Olympics, unfinished — 75 rooms ready, out of the 175 promised. Weeks after the Justice system opened an investigation, the Trump Organization itself tore the name off the facade.

When the police operation finally arrived in 2019, Figueiredo was a fugitive for six months. He was eventually arrested in Miami — and is still responding today, as a defendant, for active corruption, money laundering, and criminal organization.

From the shipwreck also remained the bill from the financial market. In December 2024, the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) applied a personal fine of R$ 102 million to Figueiredo — the largest among the eight convicted in the case — for overvaluation of assets and artificial issuance of quotas of the hotel fund.

The epilogue came out weeks ago: the hotel company had its bankruptcy declared in June, and the building ended up in the hands of creditors. It was in that year of 2019, between the flight and the arrest, that Figueiredo moved permanently to Florida.

The company that would receive Guo’s money had been registered two years earlier. Figueiredo’s American life and the firm that would connect him to the scam were born together.

Today he has two charges from the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGR): coup plotting and coercion of Justice, the latter alongside Eduardo. And he is a fugitive from an arrest warrant issued by the STF.

The Godfather of Washington

The man who signed the $35,000 monthly contract is the same one who today bridges the gap between the Bolsonaro clan and the White House. Jason Miller, Trump’s former spokesman, is the most aggressive operator of the anti-Lula campaign in Washington and a central piece in the articulation of the mega-tariff.

The link is not a figure of speech. It was Miller who opened the doors of Trumpism to the clan: Eduardo Bolsonaro himself credits him with presenting the “Brazil case” to Trump.

And Miller cultivated this bridge personally, in Brazil. In September 2021, he spoke at the CPAC in Brasília and was received by Bolsonaro at the Alvorada Palace; in 2022, he watched the electoral September 7th rally in Copacabana alongside the militants.

Today, it is with Miller that Figueiredo and Eduardo coordinate in Washington. It is this gear — the fugitive, the convict, and the former head of Gettr — that produced the mega-tariff and the lobby for sanctions against STF ministers.

He was the one who said that Alexandre de Moraes would be “the greatest threat to democracy in the Western Hemisphere.” Well, the American Justice system is charging Miller himself with returning $353,000.

The money reached his pocket through the same shell companies that paid Figueiredo’s company. In other words: even the salary of the head of Gettr went through the scheme’s accounting.

Miller denies any connection between the money and Guo’s crimes. And he fights in the courts not to return it.

The denial, however, clashes with the case files. Investigators and case documents show that practically all the money that sustained Gettr came from Guo’s criminal schemes.

The judge in the case herself noted that the Chinese man controlled the platform through a network of shell companies. It was these shell companies that poured the $21 million of the conviction into Gettr — and from them also came the boss’s salary.

Internal documents reveal what he wanted: to use Gettr — subsidized with stolen money — to interfere in Brazilian politics. Buying media, sponsoring politicians, and deciding which electoral poll could go public.

Brazilian institutions blocked the plan from day one. The Federal Police interrogated him for three hours in Brasília in 2021; the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) demanded Gettr’s accounts; the STF suffocated the digital militia.

Miller’s hatred for Brazil is not ideology. It is resentment for the lost opportunity of not being able to replicate in Brazil the same type of scam he participated in the US.

What exactly did he sign, order, and receive in the two years that Brazil was the apple of Gettr’s eye? That is the subject of the next part of this series.

The Score of the Four

The Chinese man will rot in an American federal prison. Eduardo Bolsonaro has already been convicted by the STF.

Paulo Figueiredo, a fugitive from his own country, hangs on the appeal trying to save his company from the conviction in Connecticut. Jason Miller is also awaiting a judicial decision, in the process where he fights not to return the money received from Guo’s shell companies.

And Miller will still have to answer, in the courts and before history, for his connections with one of the greatest fraudsters in the history of the United States.

It is because of him that we continue in the next part. The first part of the series, “The missing link: the Texas company that links Eduardo Bolsonaro to Master’s money”, is published here.