Brazilian authorities arrested former Finance Minister Guido Mantega on Thursday as part of a widening investigation targeting high-ranking figures in Brazil’s popular Workers’ Party, known by the Portuguese acronym, PT.
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Mantega served as finance minister under former presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. His arrest is part of the far-reaching Lava Jato or Car Wash investigation centered on government corruption and Petrobras.
He was detained at a Sao Paulo hospital where his wife was receiving treatment.
His arrest came just two days after Moro made a decision to put former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on trial for allegedly accepting more than US$1 million in bribes from an engineering firm in the Petrobras scandal.
Without naming Mantega, the police said “a finance minister allegedly acted in 2012 together with one of the companies to negotiate the transfer of resources to pay the campaign debts of the political party of the moment”.
Prosecutors say Lula accepted 3.7m reais ($1.11m; £867,000) in bribes connected to a multi-billion dollar kickback scheme at Petrobras.
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Police executed warrants for eight arrests and 32 seizure operations in five states as well as the capital, Brasilia, on Thursday, prosecutors said in a statement. Mantega was chairman of Petrobras then and the alleged bribing would have been asked in exchange for contracts the state-run oil company awarded to Batista a few weeks later, Lima said.
