protest against Lula’s ‘illegal arrest’

The judge of the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, Eduardo Appio, said this Monday (22) that, in fact, he used the acronym “LUL22” as an electronic identification in the Federal Justice system of Paraná, the E-proc, between 2021 and the beginning of 2022. Appio is the new person responsible for the remaining Lava Jato cases. The magistrate confirmed that the initials really alluded to the current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and said that it was used as an “isolated protest” against the supposed “illegal arrest” of the PT candidate.

“A few years ago, when President Lula was still in prison, my acronym for accessing the Federal Justice system was ‘LUL22’. At the time, I worked with social security matters and this was an isolated, individual protest against a prison that I considered it illegal. And then, in fact, the Federal Supreme Court considered the arrest illegal”, said Appio in an interview with Estúdio I, of the GloboNews.

Despite this, the magistrate said he is not a petista. “I think that the current President Lula is a very important historical figure for the country. [de Lula] will be judged by Justice”, he pointed out.

The current President of the Republic spent 580 days in prison after being convicted in the second instance, under the Lava Jato operation, for passive corruption and money laundering in the case of the Guarujá (SP) triplex. He left prison in 2016 with the change of understanding of the STF, which started to consider unconstitutional the execution of the sentence before the final judgment of the process.

The penalty would later be extinguished, in 2021, when the STF annulled the conviction, concluding that the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba did not have the competence to judge the action, and also when it judged that the former judge Sergio Moro acted in part of the process.