Lava Jato: Understand what is still left in the courts – 02/20/2023 – Power

The Lava Jato task force was ended, the main target of the operation was elected president of the Republic and the two most prominent authorities in the case abandoned their positions and were elected to Congress.

This does not mean, however, that Lava Jato was definitively closed in the Judiciary and that the cases were all extinguished or declared prescribed, as happened with those of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Even with lesser-known defendants, and with judges with very different profiles from Sergio Moro, dozens of criminal actions and procedures related to Lava Jato and its consequences are still being processed in Curitiba and in other jurisdictions across the country, including the STF (Supreme Federal Court).

Names such as ex-president Fernando Collor (today in the PTB) and former PT minister José Dirceu are some of the defendants with the possibility of going to jail as a result of the operation’s processes.

Outside Brazil, the effects of the investigations also continue to occur, such as convictions last year in the United States as a result of the collaboration agreement with Odebrecht, a contractor now renamed Novonor.

In December, the operation that strongly impacted national political life in the past decade had a milestone with the release of Sérgio Cabral, the former governor of Rio who had been imprisoned for six years, being the last major detainee still behind bars.

See the status of cases in different instances:

Pending issues in Curitiba

The report located at least 34 criminal actions being processed today in the Federal Court in Paraná, which initially handled the Lava Jato cases after its outbreak in 2014. There are also a number of other processes with progress suspended by court decision.

In the list of defendants in the first instance, there are more lateral names, such as former Petrobras executives, operators and former executives of contractors, such as Odebrecht.

Part of the lawsuits involve defendants who are abroad, in countries such as Paraguay, Argentina and Spain. This circumstance ended up delaying the progress.

The pace of processing is no longer accelerated as in the times of former judge Sergio Moro, who in some cases issued sentences in a matter of months.

One of the few remaining politicians on the list is José Dirceu, Chief of Staff in Lula’s first government. He is accused of money laundering for transfers from two contractors. Another is the current substitute for Senator Ney Suassuna, from Paraíba. Both deny the accusations made.

Dirceu’s defense questions the legitimacy of the action based on dialogues that the prosecutors exchanged in the Telegram application and that showed collaboration between the Public Ministry and the then judge Moro. The dialogues, dubbed Vaza Jato, were published by several communication vehicles, including Sheetand compromised the credibility of the investigation in 2019.

The former judge, now a senator for União Brasil-PR, issued sentences in 45 cases, from 2014 to 2018.

Part of these convictions, however, was annulled, mainly due to the STF’s change of understanding on the appropriate forum for processing cases related to the electoral slush fund.

Moro’s successor at the head of the case, as of 2019, was federal judge Luiz Antônio Bonat, who took over the post at the request of an internal transfer at the Federal Court in Paraná. He left the Federal Court in 2022, upon being promoted to the second instance.

On the 7th of February, the magistrate Eduardo Appio began to be dispatched in his place. He says he is a guarantor profile judge and said in an interview with Sheet which will try to expand the team of servers and avoid the prescription of cases. “Lava Jato is not dead,” he said at the time.

Also acting in the operation is substitute judge Gabriela Hardt, who in 2019 sentenced Lula in the case of the Atibaia site — a conviction that was also annulled.

Rio and other states

From 2015 onwards, accusations made in collaboration agreements signed based on the Curitiba investigations were sent for investigation in other states.

In Rio de Janeiro, the initiative gave rise to a series of inquiries that aimed, among other targets, at the businesses of former governor Sérgio Cabral (former MDB). The cases were under the responsibility of Judge Marcelo Bretas, of the first instance.

Cabral left jail on December 19 to serve house arrest, a restriction that was also revised in February. Convicted in more than 20 cases, he still responds to complaints made by the local task force of the Public Ministry, which was extinguished in 2021.

The Supreme Court has decided to redistribute a portion of the processes to other courts, as it understands that there is no direct connection between them and the starting point of Lava Jato in Rio de Janeiro, which was a scheme of diversions in the State Department of Works during Cabral’s administration. One of the affected cases was Operation Pão Nosso, from 2018, about corruption in the Penitentiary Administration Secretariat.

There was also a referral to the state court in Rio, as in the case of developments in the Ponto Final Operation, concerning corruption in the urban public transport sector.

Another situation under discussion is whether Operation Câmbio, Desligo, which arrested suspects of being part of a network of money changers in 2018, should remain under the responsibility of Bretas. Last July, Bretas decided to suspend the processing of the related criminal actions to await judgment on the attribution in the STJ (Superior Court of Justice).

There are still lawsuits in progress in Rio, for example, about irregularities at the Angra 3 plant and the construction of the Rio subway.

In the Federal District, lawsuits are being processed against the state-owned company Transpetro and, among others, former emedebista senator Romero Jucá (RR) is a defendant in a lawsuit related to Odebrecht.

In June, the Attorney General’s Office in Pernambuco filed a complaint related to Odebrecht’s payments abroad during the government of Eduardo Campos (PSB), who died in a plane crash in 2014.

electoral justice

The decision of the STF that established that complaints related to the campaign fund should not be processed in the Federal Court ended up reconfiguring the entire logic of the Lava Jato processes from 2019.

Judgments that were already being reassessed in the superior courts, such as those that dealt with payments to the PT, were annulled, with an order for them to start the procedure again, in the Electoral Justice.

However, this branch of the Judiciary, responsible for organizing the elections, does not have the same specialized structure to judge complex cases, and the panorama so far has been of few effective results.

Former mayor Eduardo Cunha (today in the PTB) was one of those whose convictions were annulled, and the old complaint was sent to the Electoral Justice of Rio de Janeiro. In this type of situation, in theory, previous decisions can be revalidated.

Last year, STF Minister Ricardo Lewandowski ordered the submission to the Electoral Court of the largest criminal case pending in Paraná, relating to the construction of a Petrobras headquarters in Bahia. The process, now sent to the DF, had more than 40 defendants, such as contractors and former Petrobras executives.

In São Paulo, in 2020, a group of electoral prosecutors was created to deal with cases of this type. Politicians such as current state secretary Gilberto Kassab (PSD) and senator José Serra (PSDB) were denounced.

stagnant investigations

If Lava Jato still generates a lot of discussion in the courts, everything indicates that the era of successive phases of the operation in Paraná is over. The outbreak of new operations, with the fulfillment of search or arrest warrants, no longer occurs in the molds of the peak of the investigation, between 2014 and 2018.

The most recent step was triggered in October 2021. At the time, the Sheet showed that the Paraná authorities complied with search and seizure warrants linked to the corruption scheme at Petrobras, but did not call it either a phase or Lava Jato. Officially, the investigation had 82 stages.

The Prosecutor’s Office in Paraná reported that four more complaints related to the operation were filed in 2022. According to federal judge Eduardo Appio, there are still 71 confidential procedures in progress at the Federal Court of Curitiba.

As time goes by, it becomes more unlikely that evidence collected at the height of Lava Jato will still generate new relevant developments in court.

The facts dealt with in Lava Jato are mostly related to the 2014 election — almost a decade ago, therefore. The older the suspicion, the more difficult it is to gather evidence and prove the crimes, in addition to the risk of prescription.

stf

The Supreme was one of the main stages of Lava Jato with the analysis of a series of complaints presented by the Attorney General of the Republic against authorities with jurisdiction that should be judged in court.

As of 2018, the court’s understanding changed, and cases not related to the terms of parliamentarians were sent to the first instance in the states.

One of the remaining cases in court involves former president Fernando Collor, who lost the last election in Alagoas while running for the PTB. He is accused of corruption, money laundering and belonging to a criminal organization that diverted resources from BR Distribuidora during the PT governments. In the most recent election, Collor allied himself with Jair Bolsonaro, from the PL.

The parties delivered their final arguments to the STF in 2019 and the rapporteur, Minister Edson Fachin, cited the risk of prescription. There is still no date for the trial.

Another attribution of the Supreme Court is to judge appeals of defendants convicted in other instances of the Judiciary. When there is no longer any possibility of appeal, the Justice may determine the fulfillment of the sentences.

Lava Jato defendants are in this situation, such as former PT treasurer João Vaccari, who appealed at all levels of Justice until reaching the court.

The balance of the operation in the Judiciary now and then reappears in court debates. Last June, Minister Luiz Fux said at an event that the cases were annulled only for “formal reasons”.

Gilmar Mendes, who became one of the main critics of the investigation, countered days later by stating that “you don’t fight crime by committing crime”. When talking about Lava Jato, he associated torture with the tactic of obtaining delations from arrested accused and stated that the Supreme Court “cannot endorse illicit practices”.

Ricardo Lewandowski, when suspending a lawsuit against Lula in March in the DF, wrote that there were “serious vices that tarnish the investigations” against the PT candidate and that the Public Prosecutor’s Office sought to use whistleblowers —”whoever were at hand”— to corroborate their narratives.

Other countries

Abroad, developments of Lava Jato revelations in Brazil still continue to reverberate in Justice. The main focus is on suspicions brought about by the Odebrecht denunciation, also signed in 2016 with authorities in Switzerland and the United States.

Last May, it was announced that the US court sentenced to prison for laundering related to the construction company, two sons of former Panamanian president Ricardo Martinelli (2009-2014). The bribe involved was $28 million, according to the ruling.

Austrian banker Peter Weinzierl, from a bank used by the contractor to pay bribes, is trying to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States, which intends to prosecute him.

In Peru, former president Ollanta Humala and his wife will be tried on charges of corruption by Odebrecht. Whistleblowers, such as former contractor Marcelo Odebrecht, will testify in the country’s court in April.