Prosecutor at TCU wants to reevaluate gifts for Bolsonaro – 03/15/2024 – Power

The Public Ministry at the TCU (Federal Audit Court) recommended, this Friday (15), that the Presidency of the Republic reassess the incorporation of 240 gifts received from foreign authorities into the private collection of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL).

The reevaluation, which still requires the approval of court ministers, would take 120 days to be completed and would be valid for gifts received from January 2019 to December 2022.

Attorney Júlio Marcelo de Oliveira, who signed the document, also requests that the Presidency investigate, through an administrative process and within 180 days, the existence of other possible assets offered to the former president and former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro ( PL) in the period.

The measure would also reach people and public agents who were part of the presidential delegation, or represented Bolsonaro at official events in Brazil or abroad.

According to the proposal, the mapped assets must be collected and registered, with subsequent incorporation into the Union’s assets or Bolsonaro’s private collection, depending on each case.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office also asks the TCU to clarify that “items of a very personal nature” are goods that are intended for the recipient’s own use and to establish a guideline to guide the actions of the federal public administration.

The request also provides for hearings with civil servants who may have neglected their duties by allowing gifts received by Bolsonaro to be incorporated, without legal basis, into his private collection.

The prosecutor also requests that the Presidency be recommended to promote studies to improve the legislation that governs the private documentary collections of public interest of the Presidents of the Republic.

According to the body, only goods that, due to their own characteristics, “are unique or become unique, having some distinction that intimately relates them to their recipients and to no one else” are related to the person.

It also says that the acceptance of gifts offered to public agents by foreign authorities is permitted in protocol cases in which there is reciprocity or due to the exercise of diplomatic functions. The acceptance of gifts of high commercial value is prohibited.

The document recalls that the incorporation into the private collection of presidents of the Republic or any other public authority of gifts for personal use with high commercial value, received on official missions and diplomatic events or donated by private entities, “contravenes the principles of reasonableness and administrative morality”.

It was also concluded that there are no criteria in the distribution of gifts received between Bolsonaro’s public and private documentary collections of public interest, so much so that shirts, paintings, decorative vases, jewelry boxes and sculptures were cataloged as items of the same nature.

The body considered that the inclusion of jewelry in the concept of goods of a very personal nature or of direct consumption by the recipient clearly clashes with the principles, “since jewelry has a high added value, which increases its price”.

“Jewelry is not offered to the natural person of the President of the Republic who holds the position, be it person A, B or C, but to the representative of the nation, regardless of who he is. The jewelry is offered in the name of the nation and for the nation , with the sense of perpetuity, hence the logical imperative of incorporating the jewels into the Union’s heritage”, he says.

According to the presidential collection control system, Bolsonaro received a total of 9,158 gifts from different origins during the period.

Preliminary report from the court’s technical unit found that he irregularly took 128 gifts to his private collection.

Court technicians say that 111 of these items do not have a very personal or direct consumption characteristic, while another 17 gifts are of “high value”. For these reasons, all these items should have been handed over to the Union, the audit assessed.

Of the items offered by other countries, 55 were left to public property and 240 remained with Bolsonaro, including the Saudi Arabian jewelry that put the former president in the sights of the Federal Police and led the TCU to open the analysis of the gifts.

The former president’s defense argues that he had legal support to keep the luxury items.

The Federal Police operation, last August, has not yet become a complaint (formal accusation).

Bolsonaro’s lawyers have said that there was never any intention for him to “appropriate something that didn’t belong to him” and that the procedures followed rules set out in law and decree, which even opened up the possibility of leaving items for sale or as an inheritance.