Asked if he would avoid naming anyone under investigation to his Cabinet, Vice President Michel Temer, first in line for the presidency, said in a television interview on Tuesday he was not sure.
Advertisement
The probe into a vast corruption network centered on state oil giant Petrobras has already sucked in dozens of figures from the country’s political and business elite.
The Brazilian president said Tuesday there can’t be a political trial against her without legal basis, otherwise it “would be a coup”.
Self-described militants within the Workers’ Party, which has governed Brazil for more than 13 years under Rousseff and Lula, promised to resist a future Temer government.
Reuters said the alleged scheme was similar to that at Petrobras, where company executives overcharged the state oil company for work and passed the proceeds on to politicians.
He returned to frontline politics in March, when President Dilma Rousseff nominated him as her chief of staff.
Teori Zavascki, the Supreme Court justice in charge of the Petrobras investigation, will decide whether to honour Mr Janot’s requests, though the news reports say there is no timetable for a decision. Bribes oiled the system and some of the money was used to finance election campaigns both for Rousseff and Lula’s Workers’ Party and for the center-right opposition.
Lula has repeatedly said he is not guilty of corruption and calls the efforts to investigate him a witch hunt.
Janot’s requests add to a growing uproar over just how many senior politicians are suspected of taking kickbacks from Petroleo Brasileiro SA, now known as Petrobras.
And the leaked Janot documents appeared to signal that Lula is being targeted on an even bigger scale.
Mr. Meirelles ran the central bank from 2003 through 2010, during the presidency of Ms. Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Mr Janot’s move follows testimony by Senator Delcidio Amaral, a former Workers’ Party politician, as part of a plea bargain deal in which he revealed details of the Petrobras scheme.
Rousseff on Wednesday sought to cast doubt on Amaral’s testimony, saying the senator “is in the habit of lying”.
Ten days from the Senate vote on impeachment “nothing about the routine in the Palacio do Planalto resembles the resistance announced by social movements under the cry of ‘No to the coup!'”, Estadao daily commented Sunday.
An overwhelming majority of lawmakers in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil’s National Congress, have already voted in favor of Rousseff’s impeachment on charges that she manipulated government accounts.
Leftist groups are threatening to go down swinging, vowing to make the life of an acting or eventually full president Temer miserable.
(AP Photo/Eraldo Peres). Special investigator Senator Antonio Anastasia, right, poses for a photo with Senator Magno Malta before a meeting by the commission analyzing the impeachment process of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff at the Senate in Brasil…
Advertisement
After that would come the head of the Senate, Renan Calheiros, who is also caught up in the corruption investigations.
