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Brazil's ex-president Lula sentenced to prison after corruption conviction Brazil's ex-president Lula sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison for corruption
(about 3 hours later)
Former Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who rose from childhood poverty to become a two-term president, has been convicted on corruption charges in the first of five graft trials he faces. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, once the most popular presidents in Brazil’s recent history, has been sentenced to nine years and six months in prison after being found guilty on corruption and money-laundering charges.
He was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison, but will remain free on appeal. Although Lula, as he is universally known, will remain free pending an appeal – and his supporters denounced the sentence as political persecution – the ruling marks an extraordinary fall for a leader Barack Obama once called “the most popular politician on Earth”.
The ruling marked a stunning fall for Lula, Brazil’s first working-class president, who left office six years ago with an 83% approval rating. The former union leader won global admiration for transformative social policies that helped reduce stinging inequality in Latin America’s biggest country. Lula won two mandates as Brazil’s first president from the leftist Workers’ party and helped his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, win two subsequent elections before she was impeached last year for breaking budget rules amid a sprawling corruption scandal at state-run oil company Petrobras.
Barack Obama once labeled him the most popular politician on Earth. Passing sentence on the former president, Judge Serio Moro said Lula took part in the corruption scheme, in which billions of dollars were paid to middlemen, executives and politicians for fat contracts.
The verdict represented the highest-profile conviction yet in the sweeping corruption investigation that for over three years has rattled Brazil, revealing a sprawling system of graft at top levels of business and government, and throwing the country’s political system into disarray. Lula still faces four more trials, in a process defence lawyers say constitutes a judicial blitzkrieg designed to prevent him returning to politics.
Judge Sergio Moro found Lula guilty of accepting 3.7m reais ($1.2m) worth of bribes from engineering firm OAS SA, the amount prosecutors said the company spent refurbishing a beach apartment for Lula in return for his help winning contracts with the state oil company Petroleo Brasileiro, or Petrobras. “Symbolically [the sentence] has a very heavy weight, not just for him but for the country, that voted not just twice for him but twice for the candidate he indicated,” said Carlos Melo, a professor of political science at Insper, a business school in São Paulo.
Federal prosecutors have accused Lula, who first took the presidency in 2003, of masterminding a long-running corruption scheme that was uncovered in a probe into kickbacks around Petrobras. Born into barefoot poverty in Brazil’s arid north-east, Lula ran the powerful metal workers’ union before helping found the Workers’ party with fellow leftists, unionists and intellectuals in 1980. He fought and lost three elections before winning the first of two mandates in 2002. Thanks to transformative social policies and a booming economy, tens of millions of Brazilians escaped poverty during his rule.
Lula’s legal team has previously said they would appeal any guilty ruling. They have continuously blasted the trial as a partisan witch-hunt, accusing Moro of being biased and out to get Lula for political reasons. No other Brazilian politician in recent decades has been able to capture popular imagination with such verve. Although his reputation has been tarnished in recent years, he currently leads polling for the 2018 election.
Moro has denied the accusations. If his conviction is upheld by a higher court, however, he will be ineligible to stand.
Lula’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. “He will dramatize this process, of course, he will say this is a process to stop him being a candidate. The condemnation will enter the political game,” Melo said. “The Workers’ party will exploit this politically and say Lula is a victim.”
Senator Gleisi Hoffmann, the head of the Workers party, lashed out at the ruling, saying Lula was convicted to prevent him from running for the presidency next year. She said the party would protest the decision and was confident the ruling would be overturned on appeal. Wednesday’s sentence was related to accusations that Lula benefited from about £590,000 in bribes from a construction company called OAS, which the prosecution alleged was paid in the shape of a seaside duplex apartment, renovated at Lula’s request.
Despite the conviction and other charges against him, Lula remains a popular figure among many Brazilian voters, according to recent polls, and has said he wants to run again for the top office next year. In his ruling, Moro said that Lula had bought a simpler apartment in the same building worth about £53,000, and the company had upgraded him.
But he would be barred from office if his guilty verdict is upheld by an appeals court, which is expected to take at least eight months to rule. Prosecutors said the payment was part of around £21m that OAS paid in bribes to Lula’s Workers’ party in return for lucrative contracts as part of two oil refineries that Petrobras was building, Moro wrote in his sentence.
If he cannot run, political analysts say Brazil’s left will be thrown into disarray, forced to rebuild and somehow find a leader who can emerge from the immense shadow that Lula has cast on Brazilian politics for three decades. “The responsibility of a president of the republic is enormous, and, consequently, so is his guilt when he practices crimes,” Moro wrote.
“Lula’s absence opens a gaping hole in the political scene, it creates an enormous power vacuum on the left,” said Claudio Couto, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a top university. “We have now entered a situation of extreme political tension, even beyond the chaos we have been living for the last year.” During his trial in May, Lula gave five hours of testimony in which he angrily proclaimed his innocence and denied ever owning the apartment. His lawyers, Cristiano Martins and Valeska Martins, attacked the sentence in a statement.
Couto said he expected Lula’s guilty verdict to be upheld by the appeals court. That would leave the 2018 presidential race wide open and raise chances of a victory by a political outsider, given most known contenders are also ensnared in Brazil’s corruption investigations. “President Lula is innocent. For over three years, Lula has been subject to a politically motivated investigation. No credible evidence of guilt has been produced, and overwhelming proof of his innocence blatantly ignored,” they said. “We will prove Lula’s innocence in all unbiased courts including the United Nations.”
Lula’s two terms were marked by a commodity boom that momentarily made Brazil one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. His ambitious foreign policies, aligning Brazil with other big developing nations, raised the country’s profile on the global stage. Other leftist groups also condemned the ruling. “The conviction came without any truth,” the Homeless Workers Movement said in a statement. “It is evident that the sentence is a form of judicial shortcut to remove Lula from the political dispute.”
With Lula’s swagger setting the tone, Brazil sought to shrug off northern economic and political hegemony and engage in global problems, like Middle East peace and the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program. But the sentence divided Brazilians. Angel Inoue, 36, a TV scriptwriter from São Paulo, said she was pleased. “I know the (Workers’ party) started as a cool idea, but at a certain point, this idea was substituted for power and greed,” she said.
But upon leaving office and managing to get his hand-selected successor, Dilma Rousseff, elected, Brazil’s economy soured, with the nation just now beginning to emerge from its worst recession on record. Mariluce de Souza, 35, an artist and community leader from the Complexo do Alemão favela in Rio de Janeiro, said Lula’s case was more closely linked to his party than him personally.
Rousseff was impeached last year for breaking budgetary rules. She and her backers say her ouster was actually a “coup” orchestrated by her vice-president and now president, Michel Temer, who himself faces corruption charges. “All politicians are guilty of some sort of corruption,” she said.
During his trial, Lula gave five hours of fiery and defiant defense, proclaiming his innocence and saying that it was politics and not the pilfering of public funds that put him on trial. Lula’s government was first hit by a corruption scandal called the Mensalão, in which lawmakers were allegedly paid to vote for government measures. He was still re-elected in 2006 and left office with an 87% approval rating. When his successor Rousseff was impeached in August 2016, she and Lula denounced the process as a “coup”.
“But what is happening is not getting me down, just motivating me to go out and talk more,” Lula said in his testimony. “I will keep fighting.” Rousseff was succeeded by her former running mate, Michel Temer, whose administration has also been dogged by graft scandals.
Temer himself is facing corruption charges that could see him tried by Brazil’s supreme court if two-thirds of Brazil’s lower house agree in a vote expected in the coming days.