News / Brazil

Brazil top court votes to try Congress speaker for corruption

Friday, 04 March 2016 7:53 AM [ Last Update: Friday, 04 March 2016 7:53 AM ]

Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress ©Reuters

A top court in Brazil has voted to indict the speaker of the lower house of parliament on charges of corruption and accepting bribes.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court voted 10-0 to accept charges of corruption and money laundering against Eduardo Cunha.

The unanimous vote paves the way for the senior parliamentarian to face trial for accepting bribes connected to state-run oil company Petrobras, which is already at the center of a scandal over its handling of contracts for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The decision by the Supreme Court, the only judicial institution that can try elected officials in Brazil, could hasten Cunha’s downfall and undermine efforts to impeach embattled President Dilma Rousseff.

Cunha is a member of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), Rousseff’s main coalition ally. He broke with the president last year and took up in December 2015 an opposition request for her impeachment.

Even the opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) called on Cunha to resign after the court vote.

Cunha has repeatedly said that he will not step down even though he faces charges of receiving a USD 5-million bribe in political kickbacks between 2006 and 2012.

“Nothing is unfeasible, I am not worried, I haven’t held back on my duties and I will not stop executing them. Everyone has their democratic right to say what they want to say, and defend their opinions, I am not going to condemn, comment on nor reprimand any kind of attitudes that have been shown,” Cunha told reporters on Thursday.

Though nobody has yet been convicted, dozens of political figures and former Petrobras executives are under suspicion over a scheme facilitating corruption and money laundering that saw an estimated USD 3.8 billion creamed off inflated contracts over a decade.

Rousseff, who served as the oil giant’s chairwoman from 2003 to 2010 when much of the alleged graft took place, denies knowing of or benefiting from the graft.

The scandal, which broke amid the recession-hit country’s economic meltdown, has reportedly resulted in a serious drop in Rousseff’s popularity rate.

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