Time for another quick trip down to Brazil.
We’ve reported earlier on the multibillion-dollar Petrobras scandal, which is making every American political scandal since Watergate – put together – look like a mere bagatelle. In recent months, as the investigation has widened, more and more top-level businessmen and politicians have been implicated in the kickback scheme centered on the country’s state-run oil firm.
And just as with Watergate, the net has reached ever higher. In just the past few weeks, authorities have raided the home of the beloved ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known popularly as Lula) and detained him for questioning, in response to which President Dilma Rousseff tried to name Lula as her chief of staff to protect him from prosecution – only to have the appointment blocked by a federal judge. Meanwhile, Rousseff herself has been drawn into the probe, leading to calls for her resignation or impeachment. In short, it’s looking very much these days like an endgame.
Things have come a long way since March 2014, when, as David Segal of the New York Times reported in August, Alberto Youssef, described by Segal as “a convicted money launderer and former bon vivant,” sat in his jail cell and told two lawyers that about to reveal information to them that would bring down the Brazilian republic. As Youssef listed the names of the parties who, he claimed, had enriched themselves with Petrobras funds, the attorneys became increasingly aghast; one of them, Tracy Reinaldet, told Segal that “in Brazil, we know that corruption is a monster. But we never really see the monster. This was like seeing the monster.”
In the case of Petrobras, the monster is many-headed one. So far over 100 indictments have been issued, several politicians arrested, and over a dozen companies sued. We’ve examined the cases of João Vaccari Neto, treasurer of the ruling Workers’ Party, and party hack Renato Duque, both of whom have been sentenced to long prison terms, the former for corruption and money-laundering, the latter for padding Petrobras contracts and transferring the excess take to party coffers.
We’ve discussed Joao Santana, Rousseff’s answer to Clinton campaign strategist James Carville, who was arrested for knowingly accepting payments from those illicit funds. And we’ve surveyed a number of others who’ve been nabbed for their roles in this massive scheme – among them, Paulo Roberto Costa, Petrobras’s former supplies director; Ricardo Pessoa, owner of UTC, a major construction company; and José Dirceu, Lula’s ex-chief of staff. Then there’s a couple of guys who turned state’s evidence: former Petrobras manager Pedro Barusco, who admitted he’d pocketed almost $100 million in dirty money, and businessmen Julio Camargo, who confessed to paying Petrobras $4.5 million in bribes.
But these names are just the tip of the iceberg. Several other big shots from both the public and private sector have also gone down, some of them since our previous look at this debacle. We’ll spend the rest of this week making their acquaintance.
