The rapporteur of a lower-house impeachment committee said in a report that congressional proceedings that could lead to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's removal from office should continue. The report by lawmaker and committee member Jovair Arantes must now be voted on by all 65 members of that Chamber of Deputies special panel on Monday.
A Supreme Court judge ordered Brazil's Congress on Tuesday to start impeachment proceedings against Vice President Michel Temer, deepening a political crisis and uncertainty over leadership of Latin America's largest country. Justice Marco Aurelio Mello told the lower house to convene an impeachment committee to consider putting Temer on trial on charges he helped manipulate budget accounting as part of President Dilma Rousseff's administration.
Attorney General Jose Eduardo Cardozo told the congressional impeachment committee Monday that Rousseff had done nothing wrong and to remove her would be tantamount to a putsch.“As such, impeaching her would be a coup, a violation of the constitution, an affront to the rule of law, without any need to resort to bayonets,” Cardozo told the 65-member committee.
Politicians from seven parties in Brazil were named as clients of a Panama-based firm at the center of a massive data leak over possible tax evasion, O Estado de S.Paulo said on Monday.
Brazil's embattled oil company Petrobras said it will launch a voluntary layoff program to cut an estimated 12,000 jobs in a bid to save up to 33 billion reais ($9.20 billion) by 2020. The program will cost 4.4 billion reais and is open to all employees, according to a statement from Petrobras, which has been hard hit by low oil prices, refinery project problems and a massive price-fixing, bribery and political kickback scandal.
Troubled Brazilian construction company Odebrecht SA plans to sell about 12 billion reais (US$3.4 billion) in assets to help meet its debt obligations, according to the builder’s chief executive officer. The company had a gross debt of 85 billion reais in 2014, the most recent figure available, but much of it is long-term debt and the biggest payments start only in 2025, Odebrecht CEO Newton de Souza said in an interview published Friday in the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.
President Dilma Rousseff decided on Tuesday to cancel her planned trip to the United States next Thursday to participate in the 4th Nuclear Security Summit, to be held in Washington.
Brazilian Finance Minister Nelson Barbosa said on Tuesday it is not the time for more tax breaks, disagreeing publicly with former president Lula da Silva's call for fiscal stimulus to revive a moribund economy.
A anticipated Brazil's largest party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, PMDB, announced on Tuesday it was leaving President Dilma Rousseff's governing coalition and pulling its members from her government, a departure that raises the odds she could be impeached in a matter of months.
The Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) filed a request on Monday to impeach President Dilma Rousseff for obstructing justice, fiscal accounting tricks and granting international soccer body FIFA tax-exempt status during the 2014 World Cup.