|
The financial director of the SMP&B firm, Simone Vasconcelos, left Brazil's Federal Police headquarters last night, August 1st, after a deposition that lasted nearly eight hours.
Vasconcelos works for the advertising executive, Marcos Valério, and her name appears in Rural Bank documents turned over to the Joint Congressional Post Office Investigation Committee as one of the people who withdrew the largest sums from the accounts of Valério's firms.
Since 2003 she had presumably been authorized to withdraw around US$ 2.33 million (5.5 million reaus).
She gave the Federal Police a list containing the names of the people to whom she delivered the funds she had withdrawn. Most of the withdrawals were made at the Rural Bank branch in the Brasília Shopping mall, in Brasília.
The prosecutor for the Republic in the Federal District, Raquel Branquinho, accompanied part of the deposition and says that Vasconcelos was prepared to explain each payment.
"She sustains Valério's thesis that they were loans received from the Rural Bank and distributed according to indications made by Delúbio Soares (furloughed treasurer of the PT).
"She says they were not monthly allowances [paid to individual legislators]. But loans from one party to another," the prosecutor relates.
According to Branquinho, Vasconcelos insisted that she handled only part of the loans. Considering the total amount that Valério says he lent to the PT, Vasconcelos says that other parts of the payment were passed along directly by directors of the SMP&B and DNA agencies.
Jefferson Testimony
The Joint Parliamentary Investigation Commission (CPMI) installed on July 20 to probe an alleged vote-buying scheme involving Deputies and Senators scheduled the audience of the former president (on leave) of the PTB, Deputy Roberto Jefferson (Rio de Janeiro), for tomorrow, July 3.
Jefferson is responsible for accusations referring to an alleged scheme of monthly allowances paid to legislators for them to vote in favor of bills the government wanted passed.
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
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. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.