Ricardo Salles becomes defendant in illegal timber investigation – 08/28/2023 – Environment

The Federal Court in Pará accused former Minister of the Environment Ricardo Salles, now a federal deputy for the PL, for allegedly occupying a leadership position in a criminal organization that operated in the diversion of wood.

The decision, this Monday (28), also affects the former president of Ibama (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) Eduardo Bim and other employees of government environmental agencies during the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) .

The Justice report states that the group, according to the complaint, issued “certificates and letters in disagreement with the technical guidelines of the institution’s team, with the aim of releasing wood seized in the United States”.

Salles classified the complaint as absurd. “It ignores the evidence and testimonies collected by the PF in the investigation. I am sure that the Judiciary will put things back in their proper place”, said the former minister to the report.

Bim had not been located by the report until the publication of this text.

The management of Salles and Bim, according to the document, carried out normative acts “to give an air of legality to exports of wood in disagreement with the normative instructions in force”.

The two were search and seizure targets by the PF in 2021 in an investigation into crimes of corruption, administrative law, prevarication and facilitation of smuggling that would have been practiced by public agents and entrepreneurs in the logging sector.

The operation was named after Akuanduba, deity of the Araras Indians, who inhabit Pará. It led to Bim’s removal from the presidency of IBAMA.

It was in the midst of investigations favoring the timber sector that Salles resigned as minister, in June 2021.

The Federal Public Ministry denounced the two for “forming a criminal organization in which public agents, taking advantage of public office and in collusion with representatives of the logging sector, committed various crimes directed at the interests of representatives of the logging sector”.

Salles’ role, according to the document, involved appointing civil servants to represent private interests and dismissing those who tried to combat illegal exports.

It was he who, through the complaint, met with members of the sector and ordered Bim to add rules within the scope of Ibama to allow “the export of various loads of native wood without authorization from the environmental authority”.

The MPF cites a ministerial meeting in which Salles said that acting through an opinion and a pen was very worthwhile.

According to the complaint, the ex-minister lied in his statement, claiming that he did not know what a meeting was about, in which he was present, with loggers. At the meeting, still according to the complaint, the scheme was discussed and he even told other people that “he would already be solving the problem related to the loads of wood” that were being barred in Pará.

“Private agents, directly and through associations, endeavored before the highest levels of the Ministry of the Environment and Ibama to obtain a type of general amnesty for the crimes committed (smuggling and ideological falsehood) and to facilitate the smuggling of future loads of wood”, says the document.

The MPF claims that Bim received R$5,000 in cash from loggers for the operations, but that it was Salles who met with representatives of the sector and who ordered the then president of Ibama to publish norms to favor them.

The complaint also says that the former minister practiced acts of “administrative advocacy of illegitimate interests”, “belonging to a criminal organization” and “facilitating smuggling”.