Brazil’s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has slammed as a “farce” his pending prosecution for allegedly masterminding the large-scale plundering of the state oil giant Petrobras.
“I am sad because I just learned (judge Sergio) Moro accepted the charge lodged, even though it is all a farce, a huge lie,” the ex-president said from Brazil by videoconference to New York, where his lawyers held a solidarity event for him.
Lula, 70, will now face trial for his role in a scandal that has pitched Brazilian politics into chaos, with some of the country’s most powerful leaders and parties accused of plundering the coffers of Brazil’s largest company.
“Given that there is sufficient evidence of (Lula’s) responsibility...I accept the charges,” judge Sergio Moro, the head of a sweeping probe into the Petrobras case, said in his decision.
Among the accusations are charges that the former union leader and his wife received a beachside apartment and upgrades to the property from a major construction company, OAS, which was one of the players in the Petrobras scheme.
More broadly, prosecutors last week singled out Lula — who was president during much of the time that Petrobras was being fleeced of billions of dollars — as the scheme’s “supreme commander.”
The charges allege that Lula received the equivalent of 3.7mn reais ($1.1mn) in bribes.
Lula, who presided over an economic boom from 2003 to 2011, will now go head to head for the first time with Moro, whose anti-corruption investigation may thwart the former union leader’s hopes of a political comeback in the 2018 presidential election.
Lula is the co-founder of the once-unstoppable Workers’ Party.
Its 13 years in power ended last month when his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, was convicted of budget irregularities in an impeachment trial.
The charges against Rousseff were unconnected to the Petrobras case, but the scandal — combined with Brazil’s worst recession in decades — did much to bring her down.
Rousseff was replaced on August 31 by centre-right President Michel Temer, her vice president-turned-nemesis. He has vowed to slash a ballooning budget deficit and lead Latin America’s largest economy back to growth.
But the Petrobras case also looms large over his administration, and several of his close allies are under investigation.
Lula was hailed internationally for combining business-friendly economic policy with social-welfare programmes that helped fight centuries of deep-rooted inequality in Brazil.
He also was key in winning hosting rights to the 2014 World Cup and the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, which finished on August 21 — South America’s first.
But his legacy and power base are rapidly crumbling.
He challenged prosecutors last week to prove his alleged crimes, saying he and Rousseff were both victims of conspiracies by Brazilian “elites” who felt threatened by the Workers’ Party.
The scandal has also taken a heavy toll on Petrobras, Brazil’s biggest company, which has become a symbol of the country’s decline from emerging giant to economic basket case.