Brazil: Supreme Court annuls Lava Jato evidence and says Lula’s imprisonment was a “historical mistake”

The Supreme Federal Court, Brazil’s highest court, accepted this Wednesday a request from the defense of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and annulled the evidence obtained from the collaboration agreement with the Odebrecht company, considering that it was obtained illegally. by former judge Sérgio Moro and the former prosecutors of the Lava Jato operation, while affirming that the prison sentence against the president was a “historical error.”

The ruling by Judge Antonio Dias Toffoli indicated that the alleged confessions are part of illegal devices of “psychological torture” that aimed, among others, to obtain false evidence against innocent people, while describing the prison sentence as “something armed.” that banned Lula from the 2018 elections.

The agreements of denunciations awarded to Odebrecht signed within the framework of Lava Jato in 2017 must now return to judges of the first instance to be reviewed, since Judge Toffoli considered that there was no adequate procedure and compared what happened with the torture that the dictatorship military exercised against political prisoners.

The judge stated that public agents “used real psychological torture to obtain evidence against innocent people” and that they acted with bias and outside their sphere of competence.

The former judge and former Minister of Justice, Sergio Moro. Photo: EFE

In this way, it invalidated elements of evidence contained in the “bribery systems” that were presented by Odebrecht to corrupt politicians, finance electoral campaigns and form a cartel with other construction companies to win public tenders.

The agreement between the Federal Public Ministry and Odebrecht was signed in December 2016 and ratified, within the Lava Jato area, in May 2017, by the then judge Moro.

The company promised to reveal illicit conduct and stop the practices with payment of fines in Brazil, Switzerland and the United States and its then president, Marcelo Odebrecht, was arrested.

At least 87 people involved participated in the denunciation agreements and later the construction company changed its name to Novonor for image reasons, in the middle of a process of calling for creditors.

Protesters in front of the Ministry of Justice demand the release of Lula, in 2019. Photo: Evaristo Sa/ AFP

Toffoli’s ruling indicates that Lula’s arrest in 2018 may have been “one of the biggest judicial errors in the country’s history.”

The court had annulled the sentences against the president in 2021, considering that Moro and the prosecutors politically persecuted the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) to remove him from political life and allow the victory of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro in the elections that year. .

Moro was Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice after imprisoning Lula and today he is an opposition senator.

“It was a montage resulting from a power project by certain public agents in their objective of conquering the State by apparently legal means, but with methods and actions contrary to the law,” Toffoli said in part of the decision.

He also indicated that Lula’s arrest “was the true snake egg of the attacks on democracy and institutions that were already foreshadowed in the actions and voices of these agents against the institutions and the Supreme Federal Court itself.”