Police shine light on a beacon of Brazil's elite

São Paulo Letter: Given the aristocratic splendour in which Brazil's super-rich live it is not surprising that a recent police raid on one of the great bastions of the country's elite resulted in much gloating among the sans-culottes and their tribunes in the media.

Earlier this month almost 300 police and tax inspectors showed up at the Daslu department store in São Paulo. Daslu is no ordinary shop. Latin America's premier luxury goods emporium is one of the world's great temples to conspicuous consumption.

It is housed in a huge edifice built in the graceless mock neo-classical style currently favoured by São Paulo's rich and situated along the banks of one of the city's heavily polluted rivers. Defended outside like a fortress, inside it is devoted to providing life's most extravagant indulgences to those who can afford them, which in Brazil means roughly the top 10 per cent of the population, who have their hands on about half of the country's wealth.

Here items from the world's leading designers are stocked in industrial quantities. São Paulo lore has it that Daslu's Chanel boutique does more business per square metre than any other Chanel branch.

But Daslu is not just a place to buy Chanel suits, Jimmy Choo shoes and Fendi bags. You can also get help picking up a new helicopter, luxury yacht or maybe an Italian sports car. Helping customers are the dasluzetes - immaculately groomed salesgirls drawn from the city's best families and themselves among the shop's best clients.

Earlier this month the machine gun-toting agents of Operation Narcissus rudely breached this world as part of an investigation into a tax evasion scheme by Daslu's owners, whom authorities claim defrauded the Brazilian state of more than €10 million in the last year.

The highlight of Operation Narcissus was the detention for questioning of Eliana Tranchesi, daughter of Daslu's founder and its current owner.

A product of a traditional monied family, she is a prominent member of the city's elite and a constant source of interest for the country's society gossip magazines.

That such a public symbol of the rich and powerful ended up in a police station answering questions led to unconfined glee in some quarters. But supporters of Señora Tranchesi were outraged at what several prominent socialites were quick to claim was police persecution of the country's rich.

Criminal investigations into financial irregularities of one kind or other have been much in the news here of late.

Some people wonder if the whole operation against Daslu had been concocted in some way by the Workers' Party administration in a desperate bid to shift its own corruption scandals off the front pages. But police say their investigation into Daslu stretches back over 10 months, long before the scandals that are making President Lula's life a misery hit the headlines.

Given that police have been increasingly drawn into investigating allegations of wrongdoings by senior Workers' Party officials and their associates, another theory doing the rounds is that the Daslu raid is a signal from police that they will be completely impartial and will target wrongdoers wherever they find them. This means in the country's first left-wing administration and in an elite which some in the government have accused of fanning the flames of scandal in Brasília.

There is even the intriguing possibility that two cases might be linked - an alleged bagman at the centre of a political scandal reportedly had suspicious financial dealings with one of the companies at the centre of the Daslu investigation.

But for some who pointedly describe themselves as former Daslu customers, the raid is the inevitable result of Señora Tranchesi's decision to move the shop from its former, more discreet, location to the lavish megaplex it has occupied since early June.

The old location - previously the family mansion where in the 1950s Señora Tranchesi's mother started selling clothes bought on trips abroad to her wealthy friends - was also an oasis of luxury, but back then customers could not leave in or with a helicopter, unlike now.

In a country as conflicted over class as Brazil, this theory goes, the new building was designed to attract too much of the wrong kind of attention, with the press regaling everyone with details of the 17,000 square metres of retail space whose decoration alone cost close to €20 million. If Daslu has always been a symbol of the elite, the new Daslu spoke of an elite losing touch with reality.

But, whatever the reason, just over a month after opening night when guests quaffed their way through 2,500 bottles of champagne within sight of one of the city's notorious favelas, or shanty towns, the police came knocking. Today Daslu is still open for business, but since the raid its new home seems to have lost some of its lustre.