Rio de Janeiro, Jun 23 (EFE) .- Magistrate Ricardo Lewandowski, one of the eleven judges of the Supreme Court of Brazil, annulled this Monday all the evidence against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva included in the agreement by which the construction company Odebrecht agreed to collaborate with the Justice and confess its corruption.
Lewandowski established that the confessions of Odebrecht executives citing Lula lack validity because the agreement that the company negotiated with the Prosecutor’s Office was instructed by then-judge Sergio Moro, whose decisions in proceedings against the former president were annulled because the The highest court concluded that it did not act with due impartiality.
Some of the processes for which Lula was sentenced to almost 26 years in prison for corruption and spent 580 days behind bars are based on the denunciations of some of the 77 Odebrecht executives who agreed to confess their crimes in exchange for the reduction. of their sorrows.
Lava Jato, the largest anti-corruption operation in the history of Brazil and commanded by Moro, discovered that Odebrecht had a specific department for the payment of bribes to authorities in Brazil and several Latin American and African countries, including Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.
Given the magnitude of the scandal, the consortium recognized corruption within its companies; signed agreements with authorities from various countries to confess their crimes and promised to pay millionaire fines in exchange for continuing to operate.
Lewandowski considered an appeal filed by the defense of the former head of state to be admissible and concluded that, since the Supreme Court itself annulled last week all the decisions of Moro in the four processes that he opened to Lula, the confessions of the Odebrecht executives in these specific cases lose their validity.
ODEBRECHT CONFESSIONS MAY NOT BE USED IN FUTURE TRIALS
He added that the evidence obtained from the agreement with Odebrecht may not be used in a new process in the event that the federal justice of Brasilia, where Lula’s cases were transferred after Moro’s jurisdiction was considered incompetent, decides to open him new trials to the former president.
The specific case refers to a confession of the then president of the construction company, Marcelo Odebrecht, who said that the construction company offered 12.4 million reais (about 2.5 million dollars) to the Lula Institute for the construction of its headquarters. and that the ex-president knew that it was an illegal donation.
