Bribe money at Petrobras went into President Dilma Rousseff’ re-election campaign.
Bribe money from a giant corruption scheme at Brazilian state oil company Petrobras went into President Dilma Rousseff’ re-election campaign coffers, a former CEO has told prosecutors, a report said on Thursday.
Folha de Sao Paulo daily quoted what it said was leaked testimony from Otavio Marques Azevedo, ex-CEO of Andrade Gutierrez, Brazil’s second-largest construction company, who was arrested last June.
Testifying as part of a plea bargain with prosecutors probing Petrobras corruption, Azevedo reportedly said that millions of dollars in legal donations to the 2014 Rousseff campaign were originally funded with money from bribes paid in connection to huge contracts handed to Andrade Gutierrez.
Folha’s report said that it was not clear whether the dirty money was paid into the accounts of Rousseff’s re-election committee or to her Workers’ Party.
The report fuels a potentially explosive new front in the crisis engulfing Rousseff and Brazil’s government.
She is already facing impeachment on allegations that her government illegally masked budgetary shortfalls during her re-election year.
VICTORY ANNULLED
If the court finds Rousseff guilty on this, then her re-election victory would be annulled, meaning both she and her vice president would have to step down, followed by new elections.
Prosecutors say that for years under the presidency of Rousseff’s predecessor and ally Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a group of powerful companies and politicians conspired in a pay-to-play scheme where bribes were given to win inflated contracts.
Bribes went to executives at Petrobras and other state companies, influential politicians and also allegedly into political campaigns, including those of Rousseff and her narrowly defeated rival in 2014 Aecio Neves.
The money allegedly ending up in Ms Rousseff’s campaign originated in contracts won by Andrade Gutierrez at a Rio oil facility, a nuclear power station, and the huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam complex, the report said.
Meanwhile, the impeachment of President Rousseff should go ahead, the representative for a congressional commission said on Wednesday, bringing the country’s political crisis a step closer to a showdown.
Mr Jovair Arantes, rapporteur for a special impeachment commission in the lower house of Congress, said he had concluded the “legal admissibility” of the case against the leftist president.
The decision was given in a lengthy report that Arantes read aloud, live on national television, to the 65-member impeachment commission, sometimes interrupted by deputies shouting and arguing.
Although Mr Arantes’ decision was non-binding and mostly of symbolic value, it meant the opposition drew first blood just as an increasingly bitter battle to remove Brazil’s first woman president from office gathers pace.
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