Eduardo Cunha | |
---|---|
President of the Chamber of Deputies | |
In office 1 February 2015 –7 July 2016 Suspended: 5 May 2016 – 7 July 2016 [1] | |
Preceded by | Henrique Eduardo Alves |
Succeeded by | Rodrigo Maia |
Member of the Chamber of Deputies | |
In office 1 February 2003 –12 September 2016 Suspended:5 May 2016 –12 September 2016 [1] [2] | |
Constituency | Rio de Janeiro |
Member of the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro | |
In office 9 January 2001 –1 February 2003 | |
Constituency | At-large |
Personal details | |
Born | Eduardo Cosentino da Cunha 29 September 1958 Rio de Janeiro,Brazil |
Political party | Independent (2023–present) |
Other political affiliations | |
Spouses | |
Children | 4 |
Alma mater | Candido Mendes University |
Criminal information | |
Known for | |
Criminal status | House arrest (temporarily) [lower-alpha 1] |
Conviction(s) |
|
Criminal penalty |
|
Eduardo Cosentino da Cunha (born 29 September 1958), is a Brazilian politician and radio host, born in Rio de Janeiro. He was President of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil from February 2015 until 5 May 2016, when he was removed from the position by the Supreme Court. BBC News labeled him the "nemesis" of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. [4]
He was indicted in the scandal known as Operation Car Wash (Portuguese: Operação Lava Jato) involving the state-owned oil company Petrobras and other corporations. [5] Cunha was suspended as speaker of the Chamber of Deputies by the Supreme Court on the request of the Prosecutor-General due to allegations that he had attempted to intimidate members of Congress and obstructed investigations into his alleged bribe-taking. [6] [7] [8] Cunha resigned from his position later, on 7 July 2016, after a disciplinary process in Congress that had lasted nine months, making it the longest in Brazilian Congressional history. [9]
A series of legal manoeuvres had stalled the process and kept Cunha in charge of the Chamber of Deputies. While the Chamber's Commission of Ethics was divided on the issue until June, the Chamber of Deputies plenary, on 12 September 2016, voted 450–10 in favour of stripping Cunha of his position as federal deputy for breaching parliamentary decorum by lying about secret offshore bank accounts. [10]
On 19 October 2016, Cunha was arrested by the Brazilian Federal Police, [11] accused of hiding approximately US$40 million worth of bribes in secret bank accounts [12] and on trying to tamper with investigations against him. [13]
Born in Rio de Janeiro on 29 September 1958, Eduardo Cunha is the son of Elcy Teixeira da Cunha and Elza Cosentino. As his mother descended from Italian immigrants from the town of Castelluccio Inferiore in the region of Basilicata, he also holds Italian citizenship. [14] When he was 14 years old, he began working part-time as an insurance broker. Later, he worked as an auditor at the firm Arthur Andersen, from 1978 to 1980. He majored in economics at the Universidade Candido Mendes, and served as an economist at Xerox of Brazil, between 1980 and 1982. [15]
Cunha has four children. He is currently married to journalist Cláudia Cruz.
His name was on the Panama Papers.
Eduardo Cunha is a conservative Evangelical Christian. He seeks to ban abortion, increase marijuana penalties, and further restrict homosexual activity. As an evangelist, Cunha has proposed legislation titled The Law of Heterophobia (in response to the Law of Homophobia). The law demands a prison sentence of one to three years for anyone who forbids entry to a heterosexual to any public or private property, levies special rates at hotels or restricts the public display of affection. [16]
Cunha holds the reputation of being a "picareta" politician in Brazil. [17]
His first contact with politics was working on the campaigns of Eliseu Resende , a candidate for state government[ clarification needed ] with the Social Democratic Party (PDS) in the 1982 election, and Moreira Franco, a PMDB candidate for Rio de Janeiro government[ clarification needed ], in the 1986 election. [15] When Anthony Garotinho was elected Governor of Rio de Janeiro in 1999, he appointed Francisco Silva as Secretary of Housing with Cunha as his deputy. However, Cunha was in office for just over six months, when he was forced to resign due to allegations of irregularities in no-bid contracts and favoring shell companies. [18] Then in 2001, the Court of Audit confirmed that there were indeed various irregularities in the bids of these shell companies, including the adulteration of the clearance certificate from state taxes. [18]
With Garotinho's support, in 2001 Cunha assumed a vacant state representative's seat in the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro (ALERJ), which guaranteed him immunity against the public prosecutor's investigations. He was then elected with 101,495 votes in the follow-up campaign. [19]
Cunha joined the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies on 1 February 2003, representing Rio de Janeiro. He was elected in the 2006 elections to the House with 130,773 votes. He was re-elected in 2010 through the PMDB with 150,616 votes. [19] To the TSE (Brazilian Election Commission), Cunha reported receiving R$4.76 million in donations for the 2010 campaign, of which R$500,000 came from the construction company Camargo Corrêa. [20]
In 2013, Cunha was elected leader of the PMDB in the House. The following year, he filed a complaint with the Supreme Federal Court against now-Congressman Anthony Garotinho (PR-RJ) for libel and defamation. On his blog Garotinho had referred to Cunha as a "deputy lobbyist".[ citation needed ] House aides and lobbyists with access to PMDB parliamentarians reported that Eduardo Cunha recorded on an agenda[ clarification needed ] a list of companies - mainly linked to energy, telecommunications and construction - who benefited from parliamentary action. Still, later that year, he was re-elected for another term, obtaining 232,708 votes (the third-most votes received in the State of Rio de Janeiro). [19]
Cunha was indicted in Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato), the scandal involving state-owned oil company Petrobras. Prosecutors say he "took as much as US$40 million in bribes for himself and his allies, plundering Petrobras, the government-controlled oil company, while laundering money through an evangelical megachurch." [5] On these charges, prosecutors requested "a potential sentence of 184 years in prison". [5] During this period, Cunha led the movement to impeach President Dilma Rousseff for manipulating figures in government accounts. He was suspended as speaker of the lower house by Brazil's supreme court on 5 May 2016, because of allegations he had attempted to intimidate members of congress, and obstructed the ongoing Car Wash investigation into alleged bribe-taking. [6] [7] In September 2016 the lower house voted with a large majority to strip Cunha of his seat in the lower house and to ban him from politics for eight years. [21] Once removed from office Cunha was no longer immune to criminal prosecution.
Cunha was arrested on 19 October 2016 in Brasília and sent to the Complexo Médico Penal de Pinhais, a prison in the Curitiba metropolitan area, to await trial. [22] Ordering preventive detention, federal judge Sergio Moro cited risks to "public order, as well as a concrete possibility of flight given his access to hidden resources abroad", and also his dual nationality. [23] On 30 March 2017, he found him guilty of corruption, tax evasion, and money laundering related to the Car Wash scheme, and sentenced him to 15 years and 4 months in prison. [24] [25] A federal court decided 18 July 2017 that Cunha should remain in jail in connection with separate bribery charges related to Fund for the Guarantee of the Time of Service (FI-FGTS), linked to Caixa Econômica Federal. [26]
Cunha has two additional criminal charges. One pertains to his alleged involvement in Operation Sépis[ clarification needed ] and the other, to accusations he received $5 million in bribes from ship construction contracts at Petrobrás. In addition, Cunha is the respondent in civil proceedings over alleged "illicit advantages" he gave favored contractors in Petrobrás contract bidding. [27] Cunha had previously faced charges of living rent-free in an apartment owned by a money-dealer, embezzlement and laundering money through his megachurch. [28] In May 2017, according to recordings obtained by O Globo , Brazilian President Michel Temer instructed Joesley Batista of the meatpacking conglomerate JBS S.A. to continue making payoffs to Cunha. [29] Batista allegedly recorded the conversation as part of a plea bargain. [30] [31] As of July 2017, the Brazilian justice system still had not identified the owners of eleven offshore accounts that together received $4 million US from José Henriques in connection with the purchase of an oilfield in Benin. Henrique made payments to a total of 15 accounts, including Cunha's Orion SP. [32]
Cunha had previously been accused by Marcio Faria da Silva, a former vice president of Odebrecht, in testimony he proffered for a plea bargain in his own criminal case, of negotiating a $40 million US campaign donation to the PMDB. He denies doing this. [33] The PMDB government of Rio de Janeiro, described as "ideologically malleable", reportedly demanded enormous kickbacks, roughly 5% of the total cost of the construction projects that were part of the Olympics, and the work performed for the inflated costs involved was notoriously shabby. [34]
The Brazilian Democratic Movement is a Brazilian political party. It is considered a "big tent party" and it is one of the parties with the greatest representation throughout the national territory, with the most numbers of senators, mayors and city councillors, always having formed a large part of the National Congress since 1988, and also has the largest number of affiliates, with 2,043,709 members as of July 2023.
Petróleo Brasileiro S.A., better known by and trading as the portmanteau Petrobras, is a state-owned Brazilian multinational corporation in the petroleum industry headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The company's name translates to Brazilian Petroleum Corporation — Petrobras.
Odebrecht S.A., officially known as Novonor, is a Brazilian conglomerate, headquartered in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, consisting of diversified businesses in the fields of engineering, construction, chemicals and petrochemicals. The company was founded in 1944 in Salvador by Norberto Odebrecht, and is active in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Its leading company is Norberto Odebrecht Construtora.
Michel Miguel Elias Temer Lulia is a Brazilian politician, lawyer and writer who served as the 37th president of Brazil from 31 August 2016 to 1 January 2019. He took office after the impeachment and removal from office of his predecessor Dilma Rousseff. He had been the 24th vice president of Brazil since 2011 and acting president since 12 May 2016, when Rousseff's powers and duties were suspended pending an impeachment trial.
General elections were held in Brazil on 5 October 2014 to elect the president, the National Congress, and state governorships. As no candidate in the presidential election received more than 50% of the vote in the first round on 5 October 2014, a second-round runoff was held on 26 October 2014.
Corruption in Brazil exists on all levels of society from the top echelons of political power to the smallest municipalities. Operation Car Wash showed central government members using the prerogatives of their public office for rent-seeking activities, ranging from political support to siphoning funds from state-owned corporation for personal gain. The Mensalão scandal for example used taxpayer funds to pay monthly allowances to members of congress from other political parties in return for their support and votes in congress. Politicians also used the state-owned and state-run oil company Petrobras to raise hundreds of millions of reais for political campaigns and personal enrichment.
Operation Car Wash, or Operation Jet Wash, was a landmark anti-corruption probe in Brazil. Beginning in March 2014 as the investigation of a small car wash in Brasília over money laundering, the proceedings uncovered a massive corruption scheme in the Brazilian federal government, particularly in state-owned enterprises. The probe was conducted through a joint task force of agents in the federal police, revenue collection agency, internal audit office and antitrust regulator. Evidence was collected and presented to the court system by a team of federal prosecutors led by Deltan Dallagnol, while the judge in charge of the operation was Sergio Moro. Eventually, other federal prosecutors and judges would go on to oversee related cases under their jurisdictions in various Brazilian states. The operation implicated leading businessmen, federal congressmen, senators, state governors, federal government ministers, and former presidents Collor, Temer and Lula. Companies and individuals accused of involvement have agreed to pay 25 billion reais in fines and restitution of embezzled public funds.
In 2015 and 2016, a series of protests in Brazil denounced corruption and the government of President Dilma Rousseff, triggered by revelations that numerous politicians allegedly accepted bribes connected to contracts at state-owned energy company Petrobras between 2003 and 2010 and connected to the Workers' Party, while Rousseff chaired the company's board of directors. The first protests on 15 March 2015 numbered between one and nearly three million protesters against the scandal and the country's poor economic situation. In response, the government introduced anti-corruption legislation. A second day of major protesting occurred 12 April, with turnout, according to GloboNews, ranging from 696,000 to 1,500,000. On 16 August, protests took place in 200 cities in all 26 states of Brazil. Following allegations that Rousseff's predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, participated in money laundering and a prosecutor ordered his arrest, record numbers of Brazilians protested against the Rousseff government on 13 March 2016, with nearly 7 million citizens demonstrating.
Events in the year 2016 in Brazil:
The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the 36th president of Brazil, began on 2 December 2015 with a petition for her impeachment being accepted by Eduardo Cunha, then president of the Chamber of Deputies, and continued into late 2016. Dilma Rousseff, then more than 12 months into her second four-year term, was charged with criminal administrative misconduct and disregard for the federal budget in violation of article 85, items V and VI, of the Constitution of Brazil and the Fiscal Responsibility Law, Article 36. The petition also accused Rousseff of criminal responsibility for failing to act on the scandal at the Brazilian national petroleum company, Petrobras, on account of allegations uncovered by the Operation Car Wash investigation, and for failing to distance herself from the suspects in that investigation.
The impeachment proposal against Michel Temer, the former President of Brazil and former vice-president, consisted of an open procedural matter with a goal to preventing the continuation of the mandate of Michel Temer as vice president/acting president of the Republic of Brazil. Temer served as Acting President during the Impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff. The process began with the performance of judicial decision on April 6, 2016, the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha, to form commission for termination analysis of liability for crime offered by Mariel M. Marra. Four other requests for impeachment were presented to Cunha.
Events in the year 2017 in Brazil.
A special election for the position of president of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil took place on July 14, 2016, during the 55th legislature. The election was necessary due to the resignation of Eduardo Cunha, announced on the 7th of that month. According to the Brazilian Constitution, the president of the Chamber of Deputies is the second in line of succession to the Presidency of the Republic.
A long series of criminal investigations have occurred in Brazil associated with Operation Car Wash, since the first one began in March 2014. These investigations are considered offshoots of the original phased investigations.
A long series of criminal investigations have occurred in Brazil associated with Operation Car Wash. The first investigation was launched in March 2014, and is now known as phase 1 of the investigation, with subsequent inquiries numbered sequentially and having code names such as phase 2, phase 3, and so on. By February 2021, there were 80 announced phases of Operation Car Wash.
Clarissa Barros Assed Matheus de Oliveira more commonly known as Clarissa Garotinho is a Brazilian politician and journalist. She has spent her political career representing Rio de Janeiro, having served as state representative since 2015.
The Odebrecht–Car Wash leniency agreement, also known in Brazil as the "end of the world plea deal", was the leniency agreement signed between Odebrecht S.A. and the Public Prosecutor's Office (PGR) in December 2016, as part of Operation Car Wash. The agreement provided for the deposition of 78 of the contractor's executives, including the former president Marcelo Odebrecht, and his father, Emílio Odebrecht, which generated 83 investigations at the Supreme Federal Court (STF).
The JBS Testimonies in Operation Car Wash refer to the leniency agreement signed between the company JBS and the Office of the Attorney General of Brazil (PGR) in April 2017, within the scope of Operation Car Wash. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF) approved the agreement on May 18, 2017, based on the plea bargain of the owners Joesley and Wesley Batista and executives of the company. On September 14, 2017, former Attorney General Rodrigo Janot rescinded the agreement with Joesley and Ricardo Saud due to suspicions of obstruction of investigation by the collaborators. The following year, Attorney General Raquel Dodge rescinded the agreement with Wesley Batista and Francisco de Assis e Silva due to their omission of criminal facts of which they were aware.
The accusations against Michel Temer by the Office of the Attorney General of Brazil consisted of two accusations for common crimes filed by the Attorney General of Brazil, Rodrigo Janot, against the President of the Republic, Michel Temer, based on the crimes of passive corruption, criminal organization, and obstruction of justice, within the scope of Operation Car Wash.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)