Brazil: Ex-president Lula’s corruption convictions annulled

In a move that has caught Brazil’s legal and political worlds by surprise, a supreme court judge has annulled two corruption convictions against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Despite overseeing the Car Wash anti-corruption investigation for years, supreme court justice Edson Fachin unexpectedly ruled on Monday evening that four cases brought against the left-wing leader should not have been heard by federal judge Sergio Moro and ordered the cases retried before a new judge in the capital Brasília.

The decision automatically restores Lula’s political rights, meaning he is eligible to run in next year’s presidential elections. He was barred from the 2018 race won by far-right outsider Jair Bolsonaro following his July 2017 conviction for passive corruption and money laundering in a case involving a beachfront triplex apartment.

The union leader served 580 days of his sentence in a police cell before he was released while he appealed the conviction. He was handed a second corruption conviction in a case involving his family’s country retreat in February 2019. Two other cases had not yet reached a verdict.

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Lula’s two convictions were subsequently upheld by an appeals court but were being contested before upper courts in Brasília when Mr Fachin annulled the cases. The former president’s legal team had always contended that the anti-corruption crusader Mr Moro in the southern city of Curitiba did not have the jurisdiction to try him as the alleged crimes happened in other regions of the country.

Car Wash legacy

The decision to order the cases to Brasília for retrial was widely interpreted as an attempt to try to salvage some of the legacy of the historic Car Wash probe into rampant corruption in Brazilian politics.

Removing the cases from Curitiba based on the question of jurisdiction appeared to be an effort by Mr Fachin to forestall efforts by some of his colleagues on the supreme court to annul Car Wash cases tried by Mr Moro following the emergence of evidence that he had failed to act impartially.

But a supreme court panel dominated by critics of Car Wash moved ahead regardless with plans to hold a session on Tuesday to hear a motion filed by Lula’s defence to declare Mr Moro’s actions suspect in the triplex trial. If granted, this could lead to the collapse of all the cases against the former president.

Despite securing more than 200 convictions and the return of billions of reais to the state after revealing the corrupt relations between Brazilian politicians and the business sector that stretched across three continents, the Car Wash probe has been on the defensive since Mr Moro agreed to serve as Mr Bolsonaro’s justice minister.

For many Brazilians that decision appeared to validate accusations that the probe had always been a witch-hunt against the left-wing Workers Party, having played a key part in the impeachment of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Subsequent leaks showed Mr Moro had overstepped his role and tutored federal prosecutors in how to build cases he would subsequently try.

These errors have allowed Brazil’s political class and the higher ranks of the judiciary, who for years had been intimidated by the zeal of Mr Moro and the Car Wash task force, as well as its popularity with the majority of Brazilians, to regroup. That led to the task force being wound up last month and its remaining cases being distributed around the country.