MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Brazilian Transport ministry suspends four top officials on corruption claims

Minister Alfredo Nascimento from the centre right Republic Party

Four of the top officials in Brazil's Transportation Ministry have been temporarily suspended from their posts after a magazine reported on fraud they allegedly committed in several bidding contests on public works.

The measure seeks to guarantee impartiality in the investigation ordered by the ministry to determine the truth behind the denunciations made by the weekly magazine Veja in the issue that began circulating on the weekend, the ministry said.

Representatives of the pro-government centre-right Republic Party, or PR, to which Minister Alfredo Nascimento belongs, established a network with ministry officials to favour firms submitting bids on public works that were much higher than normal, Veja claims.

The favoured businessmen apparently paid bribes to PR leaders for the contracts worth millions.

“In the face of the relevance of the account published by the magazine and the absence of evidence, Nascimento decided to open an internal investigation to quickly and thoroughly determine the alleged responsibility of top ministry officials in the deeds mentioned by the magazine,” the Transportation Ministry said in a statement.

The minister determined that, in addition to the internal investigation by the ministry's monitoring entities, the complaints will also be investigated by the Comptroller's Office.

“To guarantee the full development of the investigation and the effective verification of the facts ascribed to the directors of the entity, the public servants cited by the report will be removed from their posts as a preventive measure ... until the conclusion of the investigations,” the ministry said.

The four top officials accused of being part of the corruption network are the ministry's chief of staff, Mauro Barbosa da Silva; the ministry's Cabinet adviser, Luis Tito Bonvini; the general director of the National Transportation Infrastructure Department, or DNIT, Luis Antonio Pagot; and the chief of the state-owned Valec, Jose Francisco das Neves.

Nascimento personally communicated his decision to President Dilma Rousseff, the ministry said. Press reports, however, said that it was Rousseff herself who placed a telephone call to the minister to order him to temporarily remove the accused officials from their posts.