The recent decision by minister Gilmar Mendes that eliminated the convictions of former minister José Dirceu in Lava Jato is just the tip of the iceberg. Similar decisions are awaiting in the Federal Supreme Court (STF) several other notorious defendants prosecuted for corruption, money laundering and other crimes discovered in the operation that dismantled the embezzlement scheme at Petrobras and its subsidiaries.
The former Director of Services at the state-owned company Renato Duque, who according to investigations collected bribes in favor of the PT, appealed to the Second Panel of the Court against Dias Toffoli’s decision, in July, which denied the annulment of his processes and a request for would not be arrested. The appeal to free himself from 39 years in prison will be judged by Gilmar Mendes, André Mendonça, Edson Fachin and Nunes Marques, but there is still no date set for the analysis.
Like Dirceu and several other defendants who have already benefited, he claims to have been a victim of political persecution and “collusion” by prosecutors from the extinct Curitiba task force with former judge Sergio Moro. Some defendants managed to escape their sentences with this narrative in the STF; others had evidence annulled, but Toffoli, who concentrates these requests in his office, has sent many of them to the lower courts where criminal actions are being processed.
In addition to Dirceu, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in 2021, vice-president Geraldo Alckmin, businessmen Walter Faria and Paulo Skaf, former minister Paulo Bernardo Silva, mayor of Rio Eduardo Paes, managed to annul their convictions in the STF. , the former president of Eletronuclear Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, and the former minister Edison Lobão, for example.
Lately, Toffoli – who inherited the case from retired minister Ricardo Lewandowski – has been responding to individual requests to annul the evidence arising from Odebrecht’s leniency agreement. With this decision, it opens the way for defendants to empty the complaints and criminal proceedings that they respond to in the various instances where their cases are being processed.
In September last year, the minister had already declared the worthlessness of all this evidence, but several defendants sought an individual decision in this regard from the STF, to speed up the annulment of their cases and avoid going back and forth in the lower courts.
In addition to Duque, former PT treasurer João Vaccari Neto wants to get rid of the convictions. To do this, he turned to Gilmar Mendes with arguments similar to those of Dirceu, that his sentence was political. The request was presented in October last year. In April of this year, the Attorney General of Justice expressed his opposition, arguing that there was no evidence of persecution. Since then, the order has been sitting on Gilmar Mendes’ desk.
Former governor of Rio de Janeiro Sergio Cabral is also awaiting a favorable decision from the STF. He asked Toffoli for an extension of the decision that zeroed criminal proceedings against businessman Marcelo Odebrecht and benefited former governor of Paraná Beto Richa. In this request, Cabral wants to escape a 14-year prison sentence for charging bribes in the works of Comperj, a petrochemical complex in Rio.
In part of the decisions already given, Toffoli rejects the annulment of the convictions, sending the cases back to the first instance. One of the minister’s last decisions in this regard was in a request submitted in secret by the former president of the Chamber Eduardo Cunha. He countered the defense by saying there was no evidence of collusion between Moro and the task force against the former deputy.
But many defendants appeal these decisions to the STF itself, so that the requests can be analyzed in the Second Panel. There are requests like this, for example, from former PT marketer João Santana and his wife, Mônica, and also from businessman Adir Assad, who are said to have been involved in the Petrolão scandal.
There is no deadline for the STF to decide on these cases. Some of the decisions are secret; other processes reach the Second Panel for virtual voting, which also makes it difficult for the press and society in general to monitor each one.
All requests are inspired by the 2021 decision that declared Moro partial in the actions against Lula. The defenses obtained from the STF the material seized from hackers who clandestinely intercepted messages exchanged by prosecutors during the operation. Some of them do not even involve Moro, but they are still used to point out an alleged persecution by the task force.
