Two weeks after the removal of Dilma Rousseff as Brazil’s president, the lower house of Congress has expelled the politician who engineered her impeachment for lying about secret bank accounts in Switzerland.
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Eduardo Cunha, the former speaker of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, was removed from office Monday night by a landslide vote in the chamber of 450 votes to 10 with nine abstentions.
The most powerful president of the lower chamber in decades, a man who thought of himself as a possible presidential candidate in 2018, Mr Cunha’s problems stem from his claim made before a parliamentary commission previous year that he did not have any bank accounts overseas.
For others, the enormous margin against Mr Cunha showed how isolated he became now that he is in the sights of Lava Jato judge Sergio Moro.
Cunha is the only sitting Brazilian lawmaker to face trial so far in the massive bribery investigation focused on Petrobras and other state-run enterprises where engineering companies siphoned off funds from overpriced contracts to pay bribes to executives and kickbacks to politicians in Rousseff’s governing coalition. “It’s a historic day – Cunha is a great evil”.
His enemies accuse him of using his power to launch impeachment proceedings as a trump card to stave off his own prosecution for allegedly taking millions of dollars in bribes.
The parliamentary vote to strip Cunha of his office, on the other hand, was exclusively on the grounds of lying to a congressional committee, as he had denied _ under oath _ having any offshore bank accounts. “They wanted a trophy”, he said at a news conference. “His time, and, we hope, that of all his ilk, has come”.
His ouster has left many politicians in the country anxious.
About 60 percent of the 513 lawmakers in Brazil’s lower house are under investigation for various allegations, according to watchdog group Transparency Brazil.
Cunha has been a key ally of new President Michel Temer, who was Rousseff’s vice president, but after the vote he criticized Temer, saying his administration did not stand by him.
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The session on Cunha was expected to culminate with a vote, but possibly not until the early hours of Tuesday. Ms Rousseff faces possible charges for obstruction of justice. Cunha, who abandoned Rousseff’s coalition past year, initiated the impeachment proceedings in December against the then-president for manipulating public accounts. Brazilian investigators say he also has had undeclared accounts in the United States since 1990 totaling more than $20 million.
