Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was charged late Thursday with several crimes, including creating a criminal organization. The charges were filed by the Federal Police (PF) following an investigation into a scandal involving the sale of official gifts given to Brazil by foreign heads of state.
Bolsonaro has also been charged with money laundering and embezzlement of state property. In addition to the former president, the PF has indicted 11 other people in the same trial, including former presidential aide-de-camp Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Cid, several military personnel including a general, Cid’s father, two lawyers, former ruler Fabio Weingarten and Frederic Assef, and former Minister of Mines and Energy Bento Albuquerque.
In this case, Jair Bolsonaro is accused of misappropriating numerous official gifts given to Brazil and not to him, namely gold watches, gold and diamond jewelry, secretly taking them with him to the United States and selling them in that country. According to the investigation, Bolsonaro’s intention was to personally benefit from public goods, so he kept the money he received from the sale of various objects.
During the year and a half of the investigation, Bolsonaro initially categorically denied that he had embezzled anything, but as evidence emerged, he changed his tactics. The former president’s latest version, which his lawyers continue to defend, is that the jewels, worth many millions of euros, which were never declared or included in the president’s collection, were personal gifts given to him by foreign officials as a form of friendship and are therefore not official gifts, but personal ones.
Jair Bolsonaro’s indictment in the jewelry case comes on the same day that federal police launched an operation against his allies in another case he is handling, this time for falsifying vaccination records. Bolsonaro is accused of ordering the falsification of a Covid-19 vaccine in 2022, which he never used, in order to enter the United States, where the immunization was then required, and where he fled the day before the end of his mandate, fearing that he would be arrested when he lost presidential immunity the following day.
Author: Domingos Grilo Serrinha (Correspondent in Brazil)
Source: CM Jornal
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