Lava Jato: Delegate who says he is being persecuted will have compensation – 06/07/2023 – Power

Pivoting to the revelation that a wire was illegally installed in the cell of money changer Alberto Youssef at the start of Lava Jato, Federal Police chief Mario Renato Castanheira Fanton became disaffected by the operation and has now won court victories, with decisions that point out that he was a victim of arbitrariness.

He had been prosecuted on a number of occasions, including a complaint filed by the Federal Public Ministry task force in Paraná in 2019.

With most of the lawsuits extinct, the police chief started to sue the Union to receive compensation on the grounds that he suffered moral abuse.

Fanton has already benefited from two federal special court proceedings against the Union.

One of the decisions condemned the Union to pay BRL 66,000, on the grounds that, in addition to the series of lawsuits it was the target of, it had obstacles to presenting its defense in them.

The judge in charge understood that there were “very serious” abuses against the police chief. Fanton won a favorable decision last year and the Union appealed. This month, the 8th appeal group of São Paulo denied the appeal against him, in a unanimous decision.

Federal judge Ricardo Geraldo Rezende Silveira said in his opinion that “numerous conducts were perpetrated outside the law and that such illegalities and arbitrariness committed damages of various kinds to the author, all related to his institutional bond and as a result of his professional performance” .

“The list of facts leaves no doubt as to the arbitrariness and illegality of the procedures [contra o delegado]which in itself would already configure the causal link of damage that is also obvious, since the promotion of defense in so many and serious procedures for a public servant is an almost inhuman task, both in psychological terms and in economic terms .”

In another action, which he won in the first instance this month, the Union is ordered to pay R$ 62,000 for having been the subject of a police investigation when he came to be seen as a “dissident” of Lava Jato.

His defense prepares other actions for moral damages on the grounds that he was harmed in a series of lawsuits he suffered in recent years.

The sequence of processes began after an investigation into clandestine recordings made at the place where Alberto Youssef was imprisoned.

The money changer was illegally recorded for 260 hours (11 days) in 2014. An analysis by the Federal Police that reached this conclusion was revealed by Sheetin 2019.

Almost ten years later, Youssef’s defense is now trying to use the episode to review their collaboration agreement, which remains in force to this day.

Lawyers for the accused, the main target at the beginning of Lava Jato and one of its first whistleblowers, asked the Federal Court responsible for the Paraná operation for access to investigations within the procedure to try to review its collaboration agreement. They want the “voluntary” of the collaboration to be assessed, implying that the accused may have been coerced into collaborating.

Judge Eduardo Appio, who ended up removed from Lava Jato, gathered the investigations and sent the records to the Federal Police to evaluate the initiation of an investigation.

Until 2015, the PF said that listening in the premises of the superintendence in Curitiba was legal, it was inoperative and had been installed years before, to investigate the drug dealer Fernandinho Beira-Mar, who was also detained in the capital of Paraná.

However, that year Fanton took testimony from agent Dalmey Werlang, who claimed to have installed the equipment under the order of Lava Jato delegates — Igor Romário de Paula, Rosalvo Ferreira Franco and Márcio Anselmo.

This testimony led the PF to open the investigation that analyzed the equipment and found that there was, in fact, an illegal recording.

After this conclusion, Fanton became the target of several actions related to Lava Jato and also to the Operation Carne Fraca, in which he acted.

He has always claimed that he has not committed any of the irregularities pointed out and that he is the target of persecution.

One of the accusations was that he had violated functional secrecy during Operation Carne Fraca and revealed information about it to former deputy André Vargas, who at the time was from the PT.

A criminal case was filed in 2017 against him, but Fanton was acquitted due to lack of evidence in the first and second instances.

Then, an action for impropriety was filed on the same topic. The case was annulled by the Federal Court in São Paulo.

Even so, the AGU (Attorney General of the Union) appealed to the Superior Court of Justice against him. The annulment was maintained and the case was closed in April of this year.

In 2019, the Lava Jato task force denounced Fanton and other police officers, on the charge that they violated functional secrecy and leaked confidential information about the operation.

The denounced deny the irregularities and stated that they have been persecuted by prosecutors.

According to prosecutors, they revealed confidential data from an investigation that investigated the conduct of other federal agents and lawyers, suspected of trying to produce a dossier against Lava Jato.

The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office says that the defendants forwarded this information to another delegate and also to the Petrobras CPI opened in Congress.

The case is under secrecy, but Fanton’s defense says the charges have already expired. There is still a disciplinary process against the delegate in this regard, which he tries to annul through a civil justice process.

Fanton also presented Appio with criminal notices in the case of Youssef’s eavesdropping.