The anti-corruption investigation 'Lava jato' loses its last international friends

Following the decision last week by the German NGO Transparency International to distance itself from the Brazilian judges and prosecutors responsible for the jailing of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the so-called "Lava jato" anti-corruption investigation has lost another international backing.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
14 October 2022 Friday 21:30
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The anti-corruption investigation 'Lava jato' loses its last international friends

Following the decision last week by the German NGO Transparency International to distance itself from the Brazilian judges and prosecutors responsible for the jailing of former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the so-called "Lava jato" anti-corruption investigation has lost another international backing.

The decision by Judge Sergio Moro and prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol to support ultra-conservative President Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential election is "a gigantic political and moral mistake," Matthew Stephenson, an international law expert at Harvard University, said in a telephone interview. whose Global Anti-corruption blog is a benchmark for anti-corruption strategies.

Moro and Dallagnol "have done, in a single day, more to undermine the credibility of the Lava Jato investigation than Lula's team did in three years," explained Stephenson, one of Moro's and Dallagnol's most loyal allies in the community. international academic.

Moro, the most visible head of the criticized legal investigation against a corruption plot in the oil company Petrobras, and the controversial prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, were elected to the Senate and the House in the legislative elections on October 2.

Two days later, Moro and Dallagnol announced their support for Bolsonaro in the October 30 elections, calling a vote against Lula's Workers' Party (PT) essential to creating a "right and center alliance" in the next election. phase of the fight against corruption in Brazil, according to Dallagnol when announcing his support for Bolsonaro.

It is the most explicit manifestation to date of the conviction of Moro and his prosecutors that the Brazilian left is corrupt and the rest are not. This despite a long history of political clientelism in Brazil -always present in Petrobras- whatever the government.

The image of the previously praised anti-corruption “task force” based in Curitiba, the capital of the conservative state of Paraná, is no longer what it used to be. But Moro and Dallagnol's statement of support may help Bolsonaro win back votes.

Lava jato continues to be perceived by a segment of the electorate -disenchanted with Bolsonaro but viscerally anti-PT- as a heroic struggle sabotaged by the Supreme Court.

Stephenson had supported Dallagnol, whose notorious Power Point presentation portrayed Lula as "the head of the biggest corruption scheme in history." Despite being a fallacious hyperbole, the phrase was reproduced in thousands of media headlines inside and outside Brazil.

In fact, the only alleged crime for which the former president was tried and convicted - an alleged bribery of a construction company materialized in a reform of a beach apartment that Lula did not own and that he never used - lacked a solid legal basis. .

More than eighty people - among them, Lula - were convicted of corruption, many of them thanks to controversial collaboration agreements encouraged with other defendants.

After spending 19 months in jail in Curitiba, Lula was released four years ago when the Brazilian Supreme Court annulled all trials against the former president. This decision was explained by the indications of complicity between Moro, Dallagnol and other prosecutors revealed in an investigation into thousands of mobile phone messages from the judge and the prosecutors leaked and published in The Intercept, in 2019.

The plaudits of the prestigious Harvard right school gave credibility to "Lava jato" for years. Stephenson even supported Dallagnol and Moro after The Intercept investigation, which she considered biased and politically motivated. But the decision of the two lawmen to ask Bolsonaro for a vote in these elections has forced even the American expert to publicly distance himself.

"I support Lava Jato; I don't think it's a conspiracy against the left; nor do I think it's necessarily bad that a judge and a prosecutor decide to go into politics; it happens a lot in the US," Stephenson said by phone from his office. at Harvard. "But I find Bolsonaro terrifying because of his ideology and he is a danger to the fight against corruption. On the one hand, he has his own corruption scandals and, on the other hand, he continues to try to sink and politicize the democratic institutions that try to prevent the corruption".

Asked if he feels used by Moro and Dallagnol, both Harvard Law School alumni, to legitimize his assault on political power, Stephenson

answered:. "I don't think they have exploited the prestige of Harvard but I may be wrong."

Harvard's rejection follows that of Berlin-based Transparency International. The NGO responsible for preparing a ranking of corruption by country also maintained very close relations with Moro, who used to be photographed with the NGO manual under his arm.

Moro and Dallagnol "abuse the fight against corruption by expressing their support for the reelection of Jair Bolsonaro," the NGO denounced in a statement last week.

The respective rejections of Transparency International and Harvard occur after Dallagnol's announcement that "my vote will be Bolsonaro against Lula and the PT," according to the prosecutor's tweet. "We have to unite the center and the right in Congress around the fight against corruption.

A member of the Bacacheri Baptist Church, one of the neo-Pentecostal denominations that have mobilized millions of evangelical votes for Bolsonaro, caused consternation in 2016 by saying that the accusation against Lula was explained by "conviction" and that prosecutors did not have of "clear evidence".

In one of the exchanges via Telegram with the Lava Jato prosecutors, many of them evangelicals, Dallagnol urges them to pray so that Fernando Haddad, the PT candidate, does not win the elections.

Moro, for his part, after winning the Senate elections in Paraná, announced his own support for Bolsonaro, a surprising reconciliation between the former judge and the ultra-right president.

A few months after sentencing Lula to nine months in prison, thus disqualifying the former president as a candidate in the 2018 presidential elections, Moro was appointed super minister of security and justice in the first Bolsonaro government.

But the relationship was not easy. Nine months later, Moro resigned after accusing Bolsonaro of interfering with police and legal independence in order to protect his children in a corruption and money laundering scandal.

After an aborted presidential candidacy, Moro is already returning to the Bolsonarista side. Accompanied by his wife Rosangela - elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the same elections - the former judge met with Bolsonaro on October 5, according to Moro spokesmen quoted in the Brasilia media, to agree on the electoral strategy. Dallagnol has said that he intends to play an active role in the far-right president's campaign.

This has caused tensions in the body of prosecutors that continues to investigate corruption in Brazil. "The prosecutors believe that more and more the impression is being given that it is worth sacrificing the principle of justice in the name of politics," Marcelo Godoy wrote yesterday in the conservative newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo.

Transparency International highlighted in its criticism of Moro and Dallagnol that "there is abundant evidence that the Bolsonaro family itself, in addition to its close ties to organized crime, has embezzled public resources and participated in illicit money laundering and enrichment," it highlights.

In the new documentary "The Secret Friend" by María Augusta Ramos, screened this week at the Doc Lisboa film festival in Portugal, there are more indications of the politicization of the investigation led by Moro and Dallagnol.. “They just wanted testimony against Lula and they were never satisfied”, says in the film a former director of the Odebrecht construction company accused of participating in the bribery network. “I told everything I knew; others invented it”.