Moro meets with Rosa Weber after complaint by the PGR – 04/18/2023 – Politics

Senator Sergio Moro (União Brasil-PR) will meet on Tuesday night (18) with the president of the STF (Federal Supreme Court), Minister Rosa Weber, at the court’s headquarters. The meeting will be closed to the press.

The parliamentarian should address the complaint filed by the PGR (Attorney General of the Republic) against him for slander due to statements made about the court minister Gilmar Mendes.

Last Friday (14), a video went viral on social networks in which the former judge appears telling interlocutors about “buying a habeas corpus from Gilmar Mendes”.

Deputy Attorney General of the Republic, Lindôra Araújo, asks that the senator be sentenced to prison and that, if the sentence exceeds four years, he loses his mandate.

“By falsely attributing the practice of the crime of passive corruption to the Minister of the Federal Supreme Court Gilmar Ferreira Mendes, the accused Sergio Fernando Moro acted with the clear intention of tarnishing the image and objective honor of the offended party, trying to discredit his performance as a magistrate of the highest court in the country,” says the PGR document.

A wing of the STF considers it unlikely that the PGR’s request will actually take the former Lava Jato judge to jail.

Ministers critical of the operation led by the then magistrate between 2014 and 2019, however, assess that the Prosecutor’s Office is important for keeping Moro under pressure.

The argument is that the former judge is now a parliamentarian and, as such, needs to be extra cautious about his own actions and statements.

The case was distributed this Monday (17) and will be reported by Minister Cármen Lúcia, who will notify Moro to submit a response within 15 days. After that moment, the minister releases the PGR complaint for collective judgment in the Supreme Court.

If the complaint is accepted, Moro will become a defendant and the so-called procedural instruction will begin, which consists of hearing witnesses for the defense, for the prosecution, and for the collection of evidence, for example.

Subsequently, the STF will decide whether or not to condemn the former judge. If there is a conviction, the penalty can be converted into the provision of services, if it is small, and there is still the possibility of Moro closing an agreement.

This Monday, Moro spoke about the case in the Senate. He claimed to have been taken by surprise by the complaint, without having been heard, and criticized what he called the “sharpness” of the PGR.

“I regret that the attorney general of the Republic sees the possibility of denouncing a senator of the Republic and asking for his arrest so easily. I do not want this to be the Brazil that we want and towards which we want to walk”, he said.

“Now, I am concerned as a senator of the Republic where we are heading in this country when we see this rush and the filing of a criminal action, without the care of listening to a senator, asking for the arrest of a senator for something that was clarified on Friday itself. fair, which did not represent what the senator thought.”