The Supreme Court of Justice of Brazil ruled this Wednesday, at the request of the president’s defense Lula da Silvathat all the evidence of the collaboration agreement with the Odebrecht company, due to the Lava Jatowere obtained illegally by the former judge Sergio Moro. At the same time, the highest court defined that the prison sentence against the president, who was imprisoned for 580 days, was a “historical error.”
The judgment was entered by the judge Antonio Dias Toffoli, who indicated that the supposed confessions are part of illegal devices of “psychological torture” which aimed, among other things, at obtaining false evidence against innocents, while at the same time describing as “something armed” the prison sentence that proscribed Lula of the 2018 election.
Brazilian court annulled evidence of former judge Sergio Moro in the Lava Jato case
The agreement between the Federal Public Ministry and Odebrecht was signed in December 2016 and ratifiedin the field of Lava Jato, in May 2017by then moorish judge.
The accusation agreements awarded to odebrecht signed within the framework of Lava Jato in 2017 must now return to judges of the first instance to review, since the judge Toffoli He considered that there was not an adequate procedure and compared what happened with the torture that the military dictatorship exercised against political prisoners.
The judge affirmed that the public agents “used true psychological torture to obtain evidence against the innocent” and that they acted with partiality and outside their sphere of competence.
In this way, it invalidated evidence contained in the “bribery systems” that were presented by odebrecht to corrupt politicians, finance electoral campaigns and cartel with other construction companies to win public tenders.
The company promised to reveal illegal conduct and to stop the practices with the payment of fines in Brazil, Switzerland and the United States and its then president, Marcelo OdebrechtHe was arrested.
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The Brazilian construction company, the main protagonist in the corruption plot in Brazil and the region during the last decades.
At least 87 people involved participated in the denunciation agreements and later the construction company changed its name to Novonor for image reasons, in the middle of a creditor summons process.
Lava Jato: Lula’s imprisonment was considered a “historical error” by the Supreme Court of Brazil
The failure of Toffoli indicates that the arrest of Lula in 2018 may have been “one of the biggest miscarriages in the country’s history.”
The Court had annulled in 2021 the sentences against the president considering that Moro and the prosecutors politically persecuted the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) to withdraw him from political life and allow the victory of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro in the elections that year.
“It was a montage resulting from a power project of certain public agents in their objective of conquering the State by apparently legal means, but with methods and actions contrary to the law,” he said. Toffoli in part of the decision.
He also indicated that Lula’s arrest “was the true serpent’s egg of the attacks on democracy and the institutions that were already foreshadowed in the actions and voices of these agents against the institutions and the Federal Supreme Court itself.”
Less than three years after leaving prison for a corruption conviction that hampered his political career, Lula da Silva was elected for the third time as president of Brazil. His victory and, in fact, his participation in the elections would not have been possible if it had not been for the fact that the sentence against him was annulled.
How Lula got to jail
In November 2019, after spending 580 days in prison and not being able to participate in the 2018 presidential elections, the Brazilian justice system revoked the sentences he had received for the so-called Lava Jato Operation.
The leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) had been found guilty of the crimes of passive corruption and money laundering, but in 2021 the Federal Supreme Court (STF) revoked these sentences on the understanding that Lula’s rights had not been respected during the process carried out by the then judge Sergio Moro.
Source: Ambito
