Brazil's Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the release from prison of Jose Dirceu, who was convicted of graft-related crimes after serving as cabinet chief of ex-president Lula da Silva. Dirceu has been detained since 2015 in connection to a vast corruption scheme known as Car Wash.
The former CEO of the huge Brazilian builder at the center of the world's biggest corruption scandal spoke frankly about the billions in bribes and illegal financing that the Odebrecht company put into the pockets and campaign coffers of politicians and public officials.
President Michel Temer insists that a growing corruption scandal in his government will not paralyze Brazil as it struggles to emerge from its deepest recession in history. “Brazil doesn’t stop,” he said in an interview broadcast on Spanish television TVE ahead of a visit Monday by Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. “So it won’t be corrupt acts that paralyze the country.”
A United States judge on Monday sentenced Brazilian engineering company Odebrecht SA to pay US$2.6 billion in fines in a massive criminal corruption case, signing off on a plea deal between the company and U.S., Brazilian and Swiss authorities.
The Brazilian engineering group Odebrecht kept a secret communications system to discuss and arrange the payments of bribes. A detailed spreadsheet mapped out who got what, all veiled under a system of codenames, and overseeing it all, there was an entire department at Odebrecht whose only purpose was to ensure the graft ran smoothly.
Odebrecht SA , the Brazilian engineering company at the center of a historic corruption scandal, paid about US$3.3 billion in bribes over a nine-year period that ran through 2014, according to testimony cited by local media in Sao Paulo.
An institutional and political earthquake is shaking Brazil: the Supreme Court has opened corruption investigations into nine ministers, three governors, 24 senators, 39 members of the Lower House and other elected officials totaling at least 108 politicians, according to a report published on Tuesday by O Estado de Sao Paulo.
Brazil's top electoral court on Tuesday delayed proceedings in a landmark trial about illegal campaign funding that could lead to the removal of President Michel Temer less than a year after he took over from impeached leftist Dilma Rousseff, and 18 months before the 2018 presidential election.
Brazilian President Michel Temer is facing a terrible week, with a court theoretically annulling his presidency and forcing him to step down from office. Temer is widely expected to find a way to escape this. But the mere fact that a court is considering such a thing shows the depths of uncertainty in Latin America’s biggest country as it tries to survive in a huge corruption scandal, a two-year recession and record unemployment.
One of Brazil's leading newspapers, Folha de Sao Paulo, reported that the Odebrecht family group confessed to have provided the 2014 presidential ticket campaign, Dilma Rousseff-Michel Temer with millions of dollars in slush funds for the campaign.