‘Delation of the end of the world’ accumulates defeats under Lula’s effect – 02/19/2023 – Politics

The collaboration agreement that came to be dubbed the “end of the world denunciation” due to its impact on national politics has now been gradually considered invalid by the STF (Federal Supreme Court), blocking a series of lawsuits.

Based on a precedent that benefited the now president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), court orders have declared suspended criminal actions that were based on data from the leniency agreement of the construction company Odebrecht.

The most recent decisions, in December, favored the current vice-president, Geraldo Alckmin (PSB), and the former candidate for the Government of São Paulo Paulo Skaf (currently affiliated with the Republicans). They managed to paralyze the processing of their processes, which involved whistleblowers from the contractor, extending the effects of the pro-Lula decision to themselves.

There was also a queue of requests for extension of the measure made by others investigated in Operation Lava Jato and its consequences, which includes former deputy Eduardo Cunha (today in the PTB) and former senator Edison Lobão (MDB). The person responsible for analyzing the requests is Minister Ricardo Lewandowski.

The invalidation of part of the Odebrecht agreement —the group now renamed Novonor— took its first steps when Lula’s defense appealed to the court to have access to the entirety of the contractor’s electronic systems, at the time when it was still responding to Lava Jato actions in the Paraná.

The petista said that the Federal Court of Curitiba hindered his right to defense by continuing a criminal action without his lawyers being able to evaluate all the data provided by the contractor.

The electronic systems, called Drousys and MyWebDay, were used by the construction company to register illicit payments and were secretly stored in Europe. These data are the main corroborating evidence for reports of irregularities made by 78 executives of the contractor in depositions.

In August 2020, ministers Lewandowski and Gilmar Mendes determined that broad access to the defense be granted to the content of the leniency agreement. As Minister Edson Fachin, who reports on Lava Jato in the Supreme Court, was defeated at the time, Lewandowski became the rapporteur of a defense appeal called a complaint.

Afterwards, Lula’s defense began to make new requests to the Supreme Court, first analyzed by Lewandowski in another filed complaint.

At the end of 2020, for example, he asked for access to messages exchanged by prosecutors seized in Operation Spoofing, which investigated the hacking of the phones of Lava Jato authorities. Lewandowski granted access, and Lula’s lawyers brought hundreds of pages of transcripts of task force conversations made in the Telegram application to the file.

Based on these dialogues, the lawyer who coordinates Lula’s defense, Cristiano Zanin Martins, asked that the use of the leniency agreement against Lula be invalidated.

Lewandowski also accepted this election in 2021, after one of the criminal actions opened against Lula in Curitiba was sent to the Federal District also by order of the Supreme Court.

Citing the attorneys’ dialogues, the minister wrote that the contractor’s electronic data had been transported without due legal precautions and that the international negotiations for the agreement took place “apart from current legislation”.

The agreement with Odebrecht had been signed at the end of 2016 by authorities from Brazil, Switzerland and the United States and involved payment of a fine projected at the time to be BRL 8.5 billion.

Lewandowski considers that it has been demonstrated that the negotiation took place informally, without respecting international cooperation requirements.

The Supreme Minister also understood that former judge Sergio Moro, today declared partial in his actions in relation to Lula, dispatched the reception of the leniency agreement as proof of accusation.

Lewandowski’s measure was endorsed by two other ministers who make up the Second Panel of the court, Gilmar and Kassio Nunes Marques, in February last year.

In view of this circumstance, other defendants began to claim the extension of the effects.

Still in 2021, businessman Walter Faria, owner of the Petrópolis brewery, argued that his situation was identical to that of Lula and that the same measure should be taken.

The businessman’s request had already been provisionally answered at the time by Lewandowski and was reaffirmed last March. He was responding to criminal actions in which he was accused of participating in the illegal scheme to finance politicians devised by Odebrecht.

Former Minister Paulo Bernardo Silva, who is a defendant in Federal Justice in Rio Grande do Sul, also had the criminal action suspended in September.

In the same week, electoral criminal actions against the mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes (PSD), and federal deputy Pedro Paulo (PSD-RJ) that were being processed in Rio were paralyzed. The measure also included unfinished investigations in the state.

“The indictment was essentially based on documents allegedly extracted from computer systems named Drousys and MyWebDay,” Lewandowski wrote in the decision.

In relation to other defendants, there was no confirmation of the decision by the other justices so far. Walter Faria’s processes ended up being blocked as a result of a request with another motivation, also at the Supreme Court.

In a vote at the February 2022 trial, Fachin made a series of criticisms of the way in which the requests related to the Odebrecht agreement were processed based on Lula’s case.

He said that the only basis for declaring the invalidity of the evidence of the leniency agreement were the hacked messages from the prosecutors and that the procedure violated due process of law when there was an increase in the requests of the defenses. He also questioned the regularity of Lewandowski’s stay at the head of the analysis of these requests.

In March of last year, the Attorney General’s Office, through sub-prosecutor Lindôra Araújo, also raised similar questions. He said that “subjects totally foreign” to the starting point of the procedure “have ventured to postulate —and sometimes achieve— undue extensions of effects”.

The Public Ministry’s piece denies that there have been irregularities in the international dealings of Odebrecht’s collaboration and says that the decisions were being taken in the STF without “evidential instruction or opportunity to exercise the contradictory”.

Minister Lewandowski has said in the dispatches that the judgment on the worthlessness of the contractor’s evidence has already become final (closed with no possibility of new appeals) with the analysis of Lula’s case and that the court’s decision can indeed be extended.

The magistrate also rejected in the case file the assertion that there had been an undue expansion of the topics discussed in the complaint initially filed by Lula and said that access to the leniency agreement is and has always been the object of the procedure.

Contacted by the report, Novonor informed that “since the beginning, it has been collaborating fully with the authorities in search of the total clarification of facts of the past”.

“Today it has been completely transformed and uses the most recommended compliance standards, remaining committed to an ethical, honest and transparent performance.”