Cláudio Castro reviews plans amid wear and tear with PF – 12/24/2023 – Power

After being the target of an action by the Federal Police, as part of an investigation into deviations from social assistance in Rio de Janeiro, the state governor, Cláudio Castro (PL), needed to recalculate the route at the end of the year.

On Wednesday (20), the STJ (Superior Court of Justice) authorized the breaking of banking, tax and telematic secrecy of the head of the Rio Executive. In the same investigation, his foster brother, the president of the administrative board of AgeRio, Vinícius Sarciá Rocha, was the target of search and seizure by the PF, along with two other suspects.

The case sent a warning signal to the governor, who canceled a planned trip to China, scheduled for January 3rd. After the official visit to the Asian country, Castro would go on vacation with his family in the United States and would only return at the end of the month. According to allies, however, he preferred to postpone the plans.

The reason is precisely the investigations. Allies of the governor heard by the Sheet claim that the operation against Sarciá Rocha (who is the son of Castro’s stepmother) was felt as a harsh blow by the governor, due to the closeness between the two.

The PF investigation investigates a scheme to divert money from state social assistance programs, between 2017 and 2020 — a time when Castro was a councilor and, later, vice-governor.

The head of the Guanabara Palace is being investigated on suspicion of having received bribes from businesspeople linked to social projects, as evidenced by allegations from businessman Marcus Vinícius Azevedo da Silva, Castro’s former advisor, and Bruno Selem, an employee of Servlog, a company involved in the scheme.

According to investigations, Sarciá is one of the operators of the embezzlement of public funds. He and Castro deny the accusations.

On the day of the operation, the governor released a note saying that the development of the case through precautionary measures, four years after the accusations came to light, shows that “there is nothing against him”.

This calm, however, is not what Castro has shown to those around him. According to allies, the governor has been thinking about changing his defense strategy and started listening to other important criminal lawyers in Rio.

Today, the person responsible for the defense is Carlo Luchione, who even provided the first care to Sarciá after Wednesday’s operation. The lawyer, however, must now count on the support of Rodrigo Mudrovitsch, from Brasília, as the case is before the STJ.

Mudrovitsch’s office is also one of those considered to take on Sarciá’s defense.

R$128,000 and US$7,535 in cash were seized at Castro’s brother’s house. During the operation, the agents also took Sarciá’s cell phone, as well as notes, spreadsheets and various documents. One of the governor’s main points of tension, according to a person close to him, is the content of these notes.

The assessment by those around Rio’s chief executive is that he is politically weakened, and the operation opens up yet another point of weakness.

Castro is at odds with the president of Alerj (Rio’s Legislative Assembly), Rodrigo Bacellar (União Brasil), who nevertheless has weight in nominations for state positions. An example of this was the case of the selection of the current Civil Police Secretary, Marcus Amim, who is closer to the parliamentarian and took office in place of José Renato Torres, appointed less than a month ago.

When investigations into the embezzlement of social assistance funds began in 2020, Castro was also being investigated in the same investigation that brought down his running mate and then governor at the time, Wilson Witzel.

According to Castro’s allies, he managed to remain unscathed from investigations into health abuses because he made alliances and promises to Alerj politicians, who were able to shield him — unlike Witzel, who had his mandate revoked. This time, however, parliamentarians have already given the message that the scenario is different.

The deputies are dissatisfied with the governor and claim that he has not fulfilled the promises he made regarding appointments to public positions or the passing on of amendments.

As shown by Sheetthe Federal Police and the Federal Public Ministry claim that there is evidence that Castro used part of the salary of a ghost employee at the City Council to pay, in a “cracked” scheme, installments for a car negotiated at the end of 2016, after the election that year.

The suspicion is narrated in the decision of Minister Raul Araújo, of the STJ, who authorized the searches and seizures last Wednesday.

In his decision, Araújo reproduced a statement from the Public Prosecutor’s Office that there is evidence that “the figure of Cláudio Castro goes from being an accessory to being central to the criminal scheme.”

In a statement, the Government of Rio said that the information is “unfounded, old and rehashed”, that there has been no new fact since the investigations began in 2019, and that last Wednesday’s operation causes “strangeness and deep indignation”, since the case would boil down to a criminal accusation by a confessed defendant.