The Supreme Court, Brazil’s highest court, today granted a motion by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s defense and nullified the evidence obtained from the cooperation agreement with the Odebrecht company on the grounds that it was illegally obtained from former judge Sérgio Moro and the But former prosecutors from the Lava Jato operation reiterated that the president’s jail sentence was a “historic mistake.”
Judge Antonio Dias Toffoli pointed out in his ruling that the alleged confessions were part of an illegal means of “psychic torture” aimed, among other things, at obtaining false evidence against innocent people, while at the same time describing the prison sentence as “something armed”. called “. that got Lula out of the 2018 election.
The accusation agreements signed under Lava Jato in 2017 and awarded to Odebrecht must now go back to the trial judges for review as Judge Toffoli believed there was no due process and likened what happened to torture , which the dictatorship of the military against political prisoners.
The judge confirmed that the officers used “real psychological torture to obtain evidence against the innocent” and that they acted biased and outside their jurisdiction.
This invalidated evidence contained in the “bribery schemes” that Odebrecht had put forward to finance corrupt politicians, fund election campaigns, and cartel with other construction companies to win public tenders.
The agreement between the Federal Ministry of Public Violence and Odebrecht was signed in December 2016 and ratified by then-Judge Moro in May 2017 as part of Lava Jato.
The company promised to expose illegal behavior and stop the practices by paying fines in Brazil, Switzerland and the United States, and its then-president, Marcelo Odebrecht, was arrested.
At least 87 participants participated in the termination agreements and later the construction company changed its name to Novonor for image reasons in the middle of a creditor subpoena procedure.
Toffoli’s verdict suggests Lula’s 2018 arrest may have been “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in the country’s history.”
The court had overturned the verdicts against the president in 2021 as Moro and prosecutors pursued the Labor Party (PT) leader politically in a bid to withdraw him from political life and allow far-right Jair Bolsonaro to win this year’s elections. .
Moro was Bolsonaro’s justice minister after imprisoning Lula and is now an opposition senator.
“It was a constellation that was the result of a power project by certain public actors to take over the state through seemingly legal means but illegal methods and actions,” Toffoli said in part of the decision.
He also pointed out that Lula’s arrest “was the true serpent egg of attacks on democracy and institutions that were already heralded in the actions and voices of these agents against the institutions and the federal court itself.”
