Brazil’s top court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), voted on Thursday to convict former President Fernando Collor de Mello on corruption and money laundering charges.
Six of the ten ministers (justices) that form the Brazilian top court have cast their vote to convict the 73-year-old former president, ensuring Collor de Mello’s conviction. The four remaining ministers will cast their corresponding votes during a session on Wednesday and decide on a sentence.
Brazilian prosecutors accused Collor de Mello of receiving approximately 30 million Brazilian reais (six million dollars) in bribes between 2011 and 2014 to facilitate contracts with BR Distribuidora, a former oil and gas subsidiary of the state-run oil company Petrobras.
Collor de Mello’s presidency was short-lived, lasting a little over two years. In 1992, the Brazilian Senate impeached him on corruption charges — he was similarly accused of embezzling over 6.5 million dollars while in office. Collor de Mello resigned in December 1992, avoiding the Senate’s trial. The Brazilian Senate decided to continue the impeachment trial and voted to convict Collor de Mello, banning him from running for office for eight years. The STF ultimately overturned that conviction, allowing him to serve in the Senate.
Collor de Mello served as senator from February 2007 to February 2023.
The current case against Collor de Mello is an offshoot of “Operation Car Wash,” one of the largest corruption scandals in Brazilian history that has seen hundreds of people, including dozens of public officials, convicted. Among those convicted is radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had been sentenced to serve 25 years in prison after multiple corruption convictions during his first two presidential terms (2003-2010). Brazil’s STF overturned his convictions in 2021, allowing Lula to run again for president.
Collor de Mello defeated Lula in the 1989 presidential election.
The rapporteur in the case against Collor de Mello, STF Minister Edson Fachin, initially recommended that Collor de Mello be sentenced to serve 33 years, ten months, and ten days in prison, as well as pay a fine of 1.7 million Brazilian reais (roughly $340,681). Fachin’s recommended sentence also included a prohibition to run or hold any public office or function “for twice the period of the deprivation of liberty applied.”
The STF minister is also recommending a 16-year, ten-month prison sentence for Luis Amorim, the financial director of Collor de Mello’s companies, and a sentence of eight years and one month for Pedro Paulo Bergamaschi, a close acquaintance of the former president. All three are being tried in the same case.
Additionally, Fachin recommended that the three must each pay upwards of 20 million Brazilian reais (roughly four million dollars) in collective moral damages.
When CNN Brasil asked Collor de Mello for comment upon his conviction, the former president sent a statement through his office that simply read, “I am shocked!!!”
Collor de Mello’s lawyer, Marcelo Bessa, told the Brazilian news website UOL on Thursday that the former president has not committed any crime. Bessa claimed the accusations from the Prosecutor’s Office are based on testimonials from a plea bargain, and no evidence was presented to incriminate the former president.
“In none of these sets of facts did the Public Prosecutor’s Office put together sufficient evidence or [evidence] capable of generating the slightest certainty with regard to culpability,” Bessa said last week at the opening of the trial against Collor de Mello.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.