Federal prosecutors in Brazil on Thursday said that they were opening a full investigation into claims of influence peddling by former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose leftist Workers’ Party is already struggling with a sweeping graft scandal involving some of the nation’s most powerful political figures.
The move by a special anticorruption unit of the Brazilian Public Ministry, a body of independent prosecutors, advances a preliminary inquiry into whether Da Silva, 69, used his influence on behalf of the construction giant Odebrecht, which relies heavily on financing from Brazil’s large national development bank, for contracts in Latin America and Africa.
The expansion of the investigation increases pressure on both Da Silva, one of Brazil’s most influential politicians, and his protegee and successor, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is facing calls of impeachment over a scandal in which former executives at the national oil company, Petrobras, said they had accepted huge bribes for themselves and for leading figures in the governing coalition.
Separate from the investigation of Da Silva, Odebrecht, one of Brazil’s largest corporations, is at the heart of the oil scandal. Last month, the police arrested Odebrecht chief executive officer Marcelo Odebrecht. He remains in jail in the southern city of Curitiba. Prosecutors accused Odebrecht and other senior executives of large construction companies of knowing that their companies were paying bribes to politicians.
Reacting to the latest development on Da Silva, the former president’s institute called the full investigation “unjustified,” saying da Silva was the target of “manipulations and arbitrariness” aimed at staining his image in Brazil and abroad.
Much as former leaders of the US and other countries give speeches around the world, Da Silva, who was president for two terms from 2003 to 2010, has leveraged his prominence into lucrative speaking engagements outside Brazil. On various occasions, he has traveled abroad on private jets paid for by Odebrecht to countries where the company has contracts.
A Public Ministry spokeswoman said investigators were focusing on Odebrecht’s dealings in Panama, Venezuela, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, in addition to some unspecified African countries.
“The ex-president did exactly what foreign presidents and ex-presidents have done when promoting the business of their respective countries,” Odebrecht said in a statement.
As Brazilians absorb revelations from an array of scandals that are unfolding simultaneously, Da Silva is far from being the only prominent politician to come under greater scrutiny, reflecting how figures across the ideological spectrum in Brazil are being put on the defensive.
For instance, this week the police searched the properties of former Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello seizing more than US$1 million in cash and vehicles, including a Ferrari, a Porsche and a Lamborghini, as part of their investigation into whether Collor was involved in the Petrobras graft scheme.
Collor, 65, who is now a senator, resigned as president in 1992 during a scandal in which he was accused of condoning an influence-peddling scheme operated by his campaign treasurer.
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