New Caixa president criticizes “inadequate behavior” of men in the financial market

The new president of Caixa Econômica Federal, Daniella Marques, indirectly criticized during a closed live with bank employees her predecessor Pedro Guimarães, fired after accusations of moral and sexual harassment. THE CNN had access to the entire content of the video, which lasts 15 minutes.

“I will be opening an exclusive dialogue channel for women in the next 30 days, I am a woman, I understand what it is to be a woman in the work environment, in my career I have watched things that unfortunately we see being normalized, it cannot be called of harassment, but I call it inappropriate behavior by men in the work environment, especially in the financial sector, which is where I came from, and that this is no longer acceptable, this is something from the last century, this agenda is 80 years late”, stated.

Daniella Marques also declared in the live that “Caixa, now, in addition to being the bank of all Brazilians, will be the mother of the women’s cause”.

“We are going to work together with all our efforts, with all our product power, our network, our sales force, and the love of this Caixa family so that Caixa is the great agent for the protection and promotion of women in society. So I presented a strategic plan to the board, obviously this plan will only be possible because I’m sure, we have 35,000 women working here at Caixa and I’m sure that they are the ones who will irrigate and disseminate this culture and perpetuate it so that we can have a quick impact result and see those numbers being reduced.”

She also stated that she needs to “understand what are the pains and delve into the pain of the women, not only involved in the episode, but of others who may have felt attacked, harassed, or any other event so that we, in the review that will take place, in internal policies on harassment prevention and all others, [possa] strengthen the controls of it”.

The new president also said: “we are not here to protect anyone, we are not here to persecute anyone”.

He said he does not intend to expose the people, neither the victims nor the accused. “I don’t think anyone is interested in exposing people. We’re talking about defendants, we’re talking about possible victims, but we’re mainly talking about people. And we have to protect, in our vocation of welcoming, and protecting people, we have to protect the people who are involved, which does not mean that we will stop investigating with all rigor, seriousness, independence, but we don’t need to expose anyone. These people have families, the bank’s image is being exposed together, so media exposure is not something that creates value at this moment.”

She also announced the creation of a crisis committee, the hiring of a private company to assist in the investigations and that government oversight bodies will help audit the investigations.

“The first step was the removal of other people, without any presumption of innocence or guilt. The second step will be to create a structure in here, independent and permanent. I call it a war room, war room, risk committee, task force, whatever name you want to give it, but the fact is, it will have a multidisciplinary team, involving the independent company, involving the necessary internal bodies, involving the prosecutor union general [Controladoria-Geral da União].”

According to Marques, the Comptroller General of the Union (CGU) will assist in the investigation. “I have been in conversations since Friday with Minister Wagner Rosário, who (…) will be fully collaborating with the structure of the Federal Attorney General’s Office. [Controladoria-Geral da União] with us to find out the facts, and this week we will implement this structure that will be working in depth, hard, 24 hours, seven days a week, so that we have a serious, rigorous, but mainly independent investigation”

Marques also stated that he intends to preserve the bank’s image in the face of the episode. “Everyone has the presumption of innocence, but at that moment, it was understood, as the Presidency of the Republic understood, the bank’s high command understood, that we, above all, need to preserve the bank’s image. So we need to isolate this problem, isolate this issue, because the bank is much bigger than that. And we need to get on with life, we need to generate business, we need to welcome people, we need to produce results.”