Our partner Daphne Minerbo was featured in a Diário do Poder article on the injunction issued by Justice Flávio Dino of the STF requiring that at least 70% of the revenue from the supervisory fee be allocated to the CVM itself.
In her analysis, Daphne emphasizes that the decision goes beyond the budgetary dimension and directly affects the operational capacity to supervise the Brazilian capital markets, a reading consistent with a broader diagnosis: Brazil's regulatory challenge today is, to a large extent, one of enforcement, not of rulemaking.
The measure corrects a long-standing structural distortion. For more than a decade, the fee charged to the market to fund its supervision had been systematically appropriated by the National Treasury through the Desvinculação das Receitas da União (DRU, the federal revenue unbinding mechanism). The result, in the Justice's own words, was a picture of "institutional atrophy and budgetary asphyxiation", out of proportion with the size and complexity of the regulated market. The Banco Master case, expressly referenced in the decision, is merely the most visible face of this problem.
Three points strike us as central:
- The injunction restores the purpose-bound link between sector-specific revenue and regulatory capacity, the principle underpinning the funding model of supervisory agencies.
- The emergency plan mandated by the decision, including rebuilding the technical staff, technology solutions and swift enforcement action, converges with the agenda that regulators abroad have already internalized as a condition for effective supervision in modern markets.
- The CVM case exposes a pattern that recurs in other Brazilian regulatory agencies. The debate on the funding of sector regulation and on the constitutional limits of the DRU is likely to gain prominence in the coming months.
As Daphne concludes, institutional trust in capital markets is critical infrastructure. The STF decision recognizes this and, together with the recent Lei Antifacção (Anti-Faction Law), opens a cycle in which the central question of Brazilian regulatory law shifts from producing rules to building the institutional capacity to enforce them.
