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Brazil's president, Michel Temer, charged with corruption
Brazilian president tries to rally support after being charged with corruption
(about 9 hours later)
Brazil’s top federal prosecutor has charged President Michel Temer with taking multimillion-dollar bribes, a stinging blow to the unpopular leader and to political stability in Latin America’s largest country.
The Brazilian president, Michel Temer, is trying to rally support in Congress after becoming the country’s first sitting head of state to be formally charged with a crime.
Rodrigo Janot submitted the charge to the supreme court, saying Temer “fooled Brazilian citizens” and owed the nation millions in compensation for accepting bribes.
The deeply unpopular leader now faces a lower house vote on whether he should be tried by the supreme court for taking bribes.
Under Brazilian law, the lower house of Congress must now vote on whether to allow the top tribunal to try the conservative leader, who replaced Dilma Rousseff just over a year ago when she was impeached.
The latest challenge to his administration – which is barely a year old – was sparked by the attorney general Rodrigo Janot, who submitted a corruption charge on Monday night, alleging that Temer took millions of dollars in bribes from meat-packing giant JBS.
Lawmakers within Temer’s coalition are confident they have the votes to block the two-thirds majority required to proceed with a trial. But they warn that support may wane if congressmen are forced to vote several times to protect Temer – whose popularity is languishing in the single-digits – from trial.
In a damning document to the supreme court, Janot said Temer “fooled Brazilian citizens” and compromised the image of the country.
Temer’s office and his attorney, Antonio Mariz, declined to comment on the charges. The president has repeatedly said he is innocent of any wrongdoing.
Temer has yet to respond, but he has previously denied similar accusations. Aides claim the attorney general is engaged in a political witch-hunt.
Investigators have uncovered stunning levels of corruption in recent years engulfing Brazil’s political class and business elites. Much of it centres on companies paying billions of dollars in bribes to politicians and executives at state-run enterprises in return for lucrative contracts.
The ruling coalition currently has sufficient votes to defend the president in Congress, where a two-thirds majority would have to approve a trial. But the looming battle will further undermine the credibility of Temer, whose approval ratings have slumped to 7% less than a year after he seized power by plotting the impeachment of his former running mate, Dilma Rousseff.
Temer and a third of his cabinet, as well as four former presidents and dozens of lawmakers, are under investigation or have already been charged over the schemes. More than 90 people have been convicted.
Janot opened an investigation last month into Temer for corruption, obstruction of justice and being part of a criminal organization.
Long before Monday, political analysts had warned that the scandals reduced Temer’s chances to push through reforms crucial for Latin America’s biggest economy to rebound from its worst recession on record.
A recording emerged that apparently captured Temer, in a late-night conversation with JBS executive Joesley Batista earlier this year, endorsing hush money to former House speaker Eduardo Cunha, a former Temer ally who is serving a 15-year sentence for corruption.
Temer was charged in connection with a graft scheme involving the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS SA. Executives said in plea-bargain testimony that the president took bribes for resolving tax matters, freeing up loans from state-run banks and other matters.
Batista reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. Police have since confirmed the authenticity of the recording and declared there is sufficient evidence to indict the president.
Monday’s charging document alleges that Temer arranged to eventually receive a total of 38 million reais (£9m) from JBS in the next nine months.
Allies of Temer have been torn between continuing to support the beleaguered leader or abandoning for fear that association could be toxic during elections next year.
Joesley Batista, one of the brothers who control JBS, recorded a conversation with Temer in March in which the president appears to condone bribing a potential witness. Batista also accused Temer and aides of negotiating millions of dollars in illegal donations for his Brazilian Democratic Movement party.
Janot’s 64-page decision was a blistering assessment of Temer and his actions as Brazil’s top leader. Janot said bribes to Temer could have reached about $12m over nine months, and that in general Temer showed a total disregard for the office.
Brazil’s federal police released a separate document on Monday about that conversation with Batista. They recovered a previously inaudible portion of the recording in which Temer is heard telling the scandal-plagued billionaire that it was mainly because of his influence that he chose to appoint Henrique Meirelles as finance minister.
“The circumstances of this meeting [with Batista] – at night and without any register in the official schedule of the president of the Republic – reveal the intent of not leaving traces of the criminal actions already taken,” wrote Janot.
The significance of the comment about Meirelles, who is widely respected in financial markets, was not immediately clear and the finance ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Temer had started the week attempting to to show that his government conducting business as usual, defiantly saying he wasn’t going anywhere in his first comments since returning from an overseas trip last week that was filled with gaffes and mounting bad news.
Key lawmakers in Temer’s alliance told Reuters, on condition of anonymity, that they would halt work on proposed labour reforms if forced to vote on charges against the president.
In Norway, the prime minister, Erna Solberg, told him Brazil needed to deal with its corruption woes. Norway also halved its contribution to an Amazon rainforest fund due to the Brazil’s government’s failure to address accelerating deforestation.
Temer’s supporters say they have between 250 and 300 votes in the 513 seat lower house to block a trial. But the president is expected to soon face charges of racketeering and obstruction of justice, each requiring a separate vote. Prosecutors have said they may also file other charges.
The increased deforestation began before Temer took power last year, but environmentalists argue his policies are aggravating the situation.
On Monday, the federal police recommended charging Temer with obstruction of justice – the first step towards a likely round of other charges in addition to graft. Top lawmakers said Janot’s expected strategy of presenting charges one at a time would throw Temer’s future into uncertainty.
“It was a trip to distract people from the problems in politics,” said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “It ended up being a disaster.”
With all of Congress facing re-election next year, many said that if public outrage boiled over, it would be hard to maintain support for Temer.
Even stalwart allies have begun to bail on Temer.
“If this grinds on with multiple votes, you may start to see a lack of governability,” said one senior politician in Temer’s coalition. “In that case, there will be defections, and colleagues may start to move against Temer.”
Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who initially supported Temer and is a key leader of the junior coalition party, said in an article published by daily Folha de S.Paulo on Monday that the president could end the crisis by ushering in new elections sooner than the end of his mandate, which goes through 2018.
Carlos Melo, a political scientist with Insper, a Sao Paulo business school, said Janot knew he would lose the first corruption charge against Temer “but he is like a chess player, thinking two or three votes down the line”.
“I plead with the president to meditate over the opportunity of such a gesture of greatness,” said Cardoso.
Melo said the votes by lawmakers, many of whom are facing their own corruption investigations, would be a test of how alienated Brazil’s political class was from an increasingly angry population.
“If Congress has any connection left whatsoever with the society it represents, then Janot’s strategy of wearing lawmakers down with multiple votes will win and you will see the president put on trial,” Melo said.
But he added that if congressmen rally around Temer, “then we must face the horrific fact that what we have is a political system entirely detached from society, and it will pay the price in next year’s election”.
