Military officers who served as advisers to Jair Bolsonaro lied in statements to Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) to protect the former president from accusations that they diverted valuable official gifts given to Brazil by other countries and sold them in the United States, keeping the money.
In a final investigation report sent to the Federal Supreme Court (STF) last week indicting Bolsonaro and 11 other people, including lawyers and senior military officials, the federal police said at least two presidential advisers had provided false information to divert attention from the former ruler.
“It is clear that the people being investigated have combined the versions that were to be presented to the police authorities in order to try to hide the illegal actions committed, in this case the sending of jewels abroad for sale and the return of the proceeds from them “illegally to the collection of the former president,” says the Federal Police report on the diversion and sale abroad of several gifts that were to go into the collection of the Brazilian president, namely sets of gold watches by Rolex, Chopard and Patek Philippe, necklaces, men’s and women’s rings in gold and precious stones worth several million euros, taken by Jair Bolsonaro on the presidential plane when he fled the day before the end of his term, in December 2022, to the United States, and sold .
At least two of Jair Bolsonaro’s advisers, Sergeant Osmar Crivelati and Colonel Marcelo Camara, claim that the PF provided false information in an attempt to prove that the jewels in question were not diverted by the former ruler and never left Brazil. According to both men’s testimonies, collected separately, the aforementioned valuable official gifts were stored in boxes on a farm on the outskirts of Brasilia owned by former Formula One driver Nelson Piquet, an associate and friend of Jair Bolsonaro, along with many other items from the ruler’s personal collection, awaiting a permanent place of storage.
According to this testimony and the defense provided by the former president’s lawyers, Bolsonaro believed that the gold and diamond jewelry in question, much of it given during official trips to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, were personal gifts and therefore included them in his own gift, collecting and storing them on his friend’s farm, where they would be safer until their own final location was established, and it would take several days to find them among so many items and present them to the Court of Auditors, which had requested them.
The patently false statements, as the Federal Police says, were in fact intended to deny the crimes committed by Jair Bolsonaro by misappropriating state assets and selling them for his own purposes, and to give time for the jewelry, already sold in specialized houses in the United States, to be hastily bought by other allies of the former president and secretly returned to Brazil as if they had never left the country.
Author: Domingos Grilo Serrinha (Correspondent in Brazil)
Source: CM Jornal
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