|
The corruption scandals engulfing Brazil's ruling Workers Party, PT, was further stoked Wednesday by a top bookmaker who confirmed he had been offered a government contract in return for funding political campaigns.
A congressional committee investigating illegal bookmaking questioned Carlos Augusto Ramos, known as "Carlos Cachoeira," who appeared visibly nervous as he answered the lawmakers' questions.
"I don't know what's legal and what's illegal. All the contracts I signed were legal to me, until they were cancelled," Ramos told the committee questioning him about his dealings with official entities.
Last year, Ramos released a video, taped in 2002, in which Waldomiro Diniz, then president of the lottery in the state of Rio de Janeiro, asked him to donate money to candidates fielded by the PT, then headed by now former Chief of Staff José Dirceu.
"I made this tape because Waldomiro Diniz was asking me for money to bypass a bidding process," Ramos said.
When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2003, Dirceu was made presidential chief of staff, and Diniz became his legislative advisor.
The videotape's release in February got Diniz fired following claims of extorting the heads of Rio de Janeiro's numbers racket to fund PT campaigns.
He was also accused of helping a U.S. company that won a 130 million US dollars contract to supply equipment for Brazil's legal official lottery.
Diniz's illegal dealings with numbers racketeers, which surfaced last year, was the first scandal that tarnished the PT, but the party succeeded in thwarting opposition efforts to have Congress investigate the case and probe Dirceu's role in it.
The bookies' investigation runs parallel to another focusing on corruption in the government managed postal service, and a third kicks off next Tuesday which will look into allegations that during Lula's first two years in office the PT bribed Congress members in support of the administration's legislative projects.
The secretary of the committee investigating the postal service, Omar Serraglio, said Wednesday that he will subpoena the head of the administration's communications office, Luiz Gushiken, a close friend of Lula, to testify regarding the service's activities.
Serraglio made the comment after former postal service Director Airton Dipp testified Wednesday that Gushiken's office had more power than the service in deciding publicity contracts, which has been identified as a source of corruption.
Last week, the press revealed that a company Gushiken had owned increased its business 600% after Lula took office.
However President Lula da Silva publicly expressed support for Gushiken who was confirmed in the administration's communications office.
This article appeared originally in Mercopress - www.mercopress.com.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Brazil received a huge boost in its international image with its selection as the host of the 2016 Olympics, but it was really just the cherry on top of the overall recognition of the country's ascension to the ranks of one of the world's most important countries. Now, as it finally takes its place on the world scene, there has been a great deal of concern about what kind of image Brazil hopes to project, now that the world is really paying attention. 
The only good thing to say about the visit to Brazil of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday November 23, is that it was mercifully short and lasted less than 24 hours. Ahmadinejad had his picture taken being hugged by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who gave him a warm welcome and said Iran had every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose.