Ep57 - What does the market say about me?

Yesterday, I showed a 2010 court document in which Eni presented a new explanation for my dismissal from AGIP do Brasil.

But one question had remained unanswered for years:

📌 Why was I unable to rebuild my executive career?

I had experience, professional results and extensive knowledge of the fuel industry.

Yet after my dismissal, my career changed dramatically.

Then a particularly important document emerged.

An executive from Royal FIC, where I worked from Aug 2002 to Feb 2003, put in writing what, according to him, was circulating in the job market:

🔷 “The job market claims that Douglas Linares Flinto was dismissed from Agip Brasil because of his involvement in the internal fraud and acts of corruption that occurred in 2001 within the Regional Sales Management in Cuiabá”.

Read that again.

According to that statement, the market was not saying that I had reported the irregularities.

It was saying that I had been involved in them.

Yet Royal FIC hired me because, according to the same document, it believed my account:

📌 that I was the whistleblower who reported the facts in accordance with the company’s Code of Ethics.

The executive added that while he worked with me, “there was never anything that discredited me”.

That document changed my understanding of what might have happened to my career.

There was now a written record that an extremely damaging version about me was circulating in the job market.

Who created this narrative?

Who spread it?

How far did it circulate?

I do not have a document that allows me to answer those questions definitively.

I do not present as fact what I cannot prove.

But one thing can be documented:

🔹 the statement records that this information was circulating in the job market.

And that raises an unavoidable question:

🔴 What realistic chance does an executive have to rebuild his career when the market associates him with the very fraud and corruption he says he reported?

In Brazil, the informal circulation of information intended to prevent workers from finding new employment is often described as “blacklisting”.

Brazilian Labor Courts have addressed allegations involving this type of practice.

Almost ten years later, a possible explanation was emerging for what had profoundly changed my professional life.

But the consequences went further.

They include what I consider the “loss of a chance” at Petrobras, as well as the effects on my assets, Social Security contributions and, years later, my retirement benefits.

That is what I will show tomorrow.


❎ Learn more:

1️⃣ Statement by the Royal FIC executive:
🔹 Portuguese
🔹 English

2️⃣ VEJA article on “blacklisting” in the Brazilian job market:
🔹 Portuguese
🔹 English

3️⃣ Brazilian Superior Labor Court (TST) decisions on alleged “blacklisting”:
🔹 Portuguese
🔹 English