The annulment of the mandate of the former president of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil Eduardo Cunha will keep on tenterhooks the usurpers of the Planalto Palace, today predicted here the journalist and blogger Altamiro Borges.
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Former President of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha addresses a plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies in Brasilia Sept. 12, 2016.
“The Plenary of the Chamber of Deputies stripped, by 450 votes to 10, the deputy mandate away from Eduardo Cunha, accused of having lied in spontaneous testimony to the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry of Petrobras in May 2015, when he said not to have accounts overseas”, the Chamber of Deputies said in a statement.
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. Prosecutors accuse Cunha of corruption an.
“This shows that Brazil will no longer tolerate a politician who turned Congress into a business counter for bribes and favours”, said lawmaker Rubens Bueno of the Popular Socialist Party.
The politician who led the charge to impeach Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff has himself been ousted from power.
Cunha, who said the accounts belonged to a trust, was pressured into resigning as speaker in July after they came to light.
Mr. Cunha is the first sitting politician to be charged in the case; 60 per cent of the 513 lower house members are now under investigation for bribery or other offenses.
60 per cent of the 513 politicians in Brazil’s lower house are under investigation. Months before, Cunha had said in a congressional inquiry that he did not have any money overseas. He denies any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors accuse Cunha of corruption and money laundering for his role in negotiating Petrobras contracts for drill ships and say he received an illegal payment of $5 million.
“It is the price I am paying for Brazil to be freed from the Workers’ Party”, Cunha said, referring to Rousseff’s party, which governed the country for 13 years. He is charged with receiving up to tens of millions illegally in bribes.
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Swiss prosecutors say Cunha held accounts at Julius Baer bank, with media reports putting their value in December at the equivalent of $2.5 million. Prosecutors have leaked credit card statements showing that Mr. Cunha and his family spent $40,000 (U.S.) on a nine-day family holiday in Miami in 2013; his wife Claudia Cunha spent $59,000 on tennis lessons, and they had a fleet of luxury cars, some registered to the company Jesus.com – even as he reported an annual household income of $120,000.
