Lava Jato: Lula and Renan lead archived investigations – 03/16/2023 – Power
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After reaching the country’s political elite, Lava Jato completes nine years with an extensive list of filings in all instances of the Judiciary. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and senator Renan Calheiros (MDB-AL) lead the ranking, with 23 and 19 investigations filed, respectively.
The bet at the start of the operation was that the investigations would tarnish the reputation of all those allegedly involved in the embezzlement of funds from Petrobras and other federal government agencies.
However, despite having created difficulties for the trajectory of several authorities, it was not enough to bury the career of almost any chief of Brazilian politics.
Lula, for example, was arrested, but the convictions were annulled. The petista regained his political rights and won the 2022 presidential elections.
Senator Ciro Nogueira (PP-PI) is another who was one of the central characters in the investigations and, even so, he did not lose his role in Brasília.
The parliamentarian had eight lawsuits filed by the STF (Federal Supreme Court) due to lack of evidence. When he was already the target of the operation, in 2018, he was re-elected as a senator with almost 200,000 more votes than the first time he was elected to the position, in 2010.
In addition, in 2021, he became head of the Civil House of the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), who won the presidential election in the wake of Lava Jato and with abundant praise for investigations.
The former president’s proximity to the operation was evident shortly after the 2018 election, with the invitation for Sergio Moro, Lava Jato judge, to command the Ministry of Justice.
A little over a year after taking office, however, the two fell out and Bolsonaro distanced himself from the members of the operation. “I ended Lava Jato, because there is no more corruption in the government”, he said, in 2020.
In 2022, the former representative and Moro got closer with an electoral objective. Bolsonaro was unable to be re-elected, but the former Lava Jato judge was elected senator for the União Brasil-PR.
Another face of the operation, former prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol also joined politics and took a seat in the Chamber of Deputies this year for Podemos-PR.
Moro and Deltan embrace the discourse that it is necessary to assume spaces of power to prevent what they see as a setback in the fight against corruption in the country.
Political scientist Christian Lynch, professor at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at Uerj (State University of Rio de Janeiro), makes an analysis in the opposite direction.
“They partisanized Justice with Lava Jato and then the idea of impartiality of the Judiciary was demoralized. This was one of the biggest disasters in history from the point of view of Judiciary credibility. from the right, if you condemn Bolsonaro, they will say that the judge is a communist.”
Lynch says that this politicization of Lava Jato made it impossible to measure whether or not the decisions that determined the shelving of investigations were correct.
“It’s not possible to know. We know that there was robbery, that so-and-so stole, but we don’t know how much, there’s no way to measure it further, analyze the operation from a legal point of view”, he says.
Archive Ranking
- Lula: 23 investigations
- Renan Calheiros: 19 investigations
- Ciro Nogueira: 8 investigations
- Aécio Neves: 6 investigations
But if there are cases like Lula and Renan, who maintained political power after the operation, there are also politicians who were forced to settle for less weighty positions after the wear and tear generated by Lava Jato.
This is the situation, for example, of Aécio Neves (PSDB-MG). Runner-up in the 2014 presidential election, he was the target of numerous investigations shortly afterwards and, in the next election, in 2018, he was elected federal deputy.
He had investigations from Lava Jato archived, such as the investigation shelved by the STF that investigated an alleged crime of cash 2 in the 2014 election paid by contractors targeted by the operation.
The investigation that most harmed him politically, however, was the recording of a phone call in which he asks the owner of JBS, Joesley Batista, for money. In all, the miner has already had six inquiries filed.
The filings occurred due to lack of evidence and also due to changes in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, which need to be followed by lower courts, on investigation methods to be respected by investigators.
In 2019, for example, five years after the start of Lava Jato, the STF emptied the jurisdiction of ordinary Justice by determining that crimes such as corruption and money laundering, when investigated along with slush funds, should be prosecuted in the Electoral Justice.
In addition, the very annulment of Lula’s convictions also represented an important defeat for Lava Jato and with consequences for other investigations.
The STF stated that the lawsuits against the petista should have been processed in the Federal Court of the Federal District, where the crimes committed by the president would have occurred, and not in the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, commanded by Moro and who was responsible for most of the operation.
It was based on this precedent, for example, that the Supreme Court annulled, in 2021, the decision of Judge Marcelo Bretas, responsible for Lava Jato in Rio de Janeiro, to make former President Michel Temer (MDB) defendant for embezzlement, corruption and money laundering. Of money.
Renan Calheiros’ lawyer, Luís Henrique Machado, says that the number of cases filed “reveals the excesses committed by certain members of Lava Jato who aimed at a clear project of power”.
“Initially, the STF was misled by the then republic of Curitiba. Gradually, the court realized the real intentions of the group of prosecutors and made the decisive intervention at the moment when the operation showed its darkest side, that is, when the leak of suspicious conversations between prosecutors and the then judge who presided over Lava Jato in the first instance came to light,” he says.
For Alberto Toron, defender of Aécio Neves, the filings “translate the realization of justice after hard work”.
The first phase of Lava Jato was launched on March 17, 2014 and initially targeted a network of money changers, one of whom worked at an exchange office at a gas station in the Federal District, which led the investigation to be baptized with that name.
At the time, Moro ordered the arrest of money changer Alberto Youssef and other suspects of financial crimes. The investigations included Youssef’s political ties and, three days later, the second phase arrived at Petrobras and arrested the former Supply Director of the state-owned company, Paulo Roberto Costa.
Months later, the two prisoners signed collaboration agreements that also led to investigations into contractors and their payments to political parties.
At the end of last year, the last of the politicians arrested as a result of Lava Jato, the former governor of Rio de Janeiro Sérgio Cabral, was released.
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