(FILES) This file photo taken on
December 16, 2016 shows Brazilian President Michel Temer (L) and his Foreign
Minister Jose Serra confering at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia. Brazilian
Foreign Minister Jose Serra resigned on February 22, 2017 due to health
problems.<br />EVARISTO SA / AFP
Brazil’s President Michel Temer
faced new allegations Thursday of receiving millions of dollars in illicit
funding during his campaign as then vice president in 2014.
The latest claims emerged in what
Brazilian media said was leaked testimony by jailed former construction company
executive Marcelo Odebrecht, who is cooperating with prosecutors in Brazil’s
biggest ever corruption probe.
Odebrecht, former head of the
giant Odebrecht firm, was quoted by Globo newspaper as saying that his company
secretly poured some 150 million reais ($48 million at today’s rate) to finance
the re-election campaign of president Dilma Rousseff and her deputy Temer.
O Estado de S. Paulo
newspaper, quoting the same leaked testimony, reported that about 30 million
reais of the 150 million were legitimate, declared donations, while the rest
was illicit.
Marcelo Odebrecht was testifying before the Supreme Electoral
Court, which is looking into whether the Temer-Rousseff ticket broke campaign
finance rules — meaning, in theory, that their 2014 victory might have to be
annulled and new elections called.
The Odebrecht company is seen as a lynchpin in a mammoth bribery
and embezzlement scheme in which corrupt politicians helped executives to win
cushy contracts from state oil company Petrobras and took money in exchange for
pushing favorable legislation. A total of 77 Odebrecht executives are
cooperating in plea deals with prosecutors, promising a flood of allegations
against politicians.
Temer, who became president last year after Rousseff was impeached
for fiddling government accounts, has repeatedly said that his center-right
PMDB party received only legal campaign donations from Odebrecht and that they
were declared.
In a statement, the presidency did not refer to the claim of 150
million reais in donations to the presidential ticket. Instead it referred to another
allegation that Odebrecht paid dirty money to Temer’s PMDB party and that Temer
had asked for the money during a meal with Marcelo Odebrecht.
The leaked testimony “confirms what President Michel Temer has
been saying for months,” the statement said. “There was a dinner but they did
not talk about numbers (of money)…. The party registered reception of 11.3
million reais from Odebrecht and the amount was properly declared.”
Rousseff’s spokesman issued a statement saying that Odebrecht’s
claims “are lies.” Brazil’s first woman president says that her removal after
impeachment last year amounted to a coup d’etat.
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