Guardian News and Media/Rio de Janeiro

A year after it sentenced leading politicians to prison in what was labelled the corruption trial of the century, Brazil’s Supreme Court has finally decided to actually send them to jail.

Among those likely to be imprisoned in the next few days is ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s former chief of staff and so-called strongman, Jose Dirceu.

He and others convicted had been able to delay jail sentences with complex procedural appeals on some of the charges they were convicted on.

Now they will be imprisoned while their appeals continue to be heard.

“It is an emblematic decision. People who commit these crimes will be subject to punishment like anybody else,” said Roberto Dias, professor of constitutional law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo.

First exposed in 2005, the mensalao (big monthly payment) was a wide-ranging corruption scheme in which politicians from parties allied to the ruling Workers party, Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT, were paid bribes to support government measures.

The scandal nearly brought down the Lula government. Lula has always denied the scheme’s existence even though in 2005 he apologised for it.

The court found 25 people, including Dirceu, the PT’s former president Jose Genoino and former treasurer Delubio Soares, and Marcos Valerio, the advertising executive who operated the scheme, guilty in 2012.

But it failed to send anybody to prison when a number of the convicted mounted complex legal appeals - leading to widespread cynicism in Brazil, where politicians are rarely jailed despite the country’s endemic corruption.