The (Superior Court of Justice) excluded the former minister of the Civil House, the former president of José Genoino and the former treasurer of the acronym Delúbio Soares from a process of administrative improbity linked to the . Also excluded from the action was Anderson Adauto Pereira, Minister of Transport in the first Lula (PT) government.
The defendants had filed a motion for dissent in an administrative improbity action involving the corruption case that marked national politics in the first decade of this century.
They refuted the decision of the Second Panel of the STJ that accepted a special appeal from the Federal Public Ministry to reform a previous decision that had already excluded the defendants.
Disagreement embargoes, a resource used by them, are used to standardize a court’s understanding of the same legal topic so that the court can say which decision should prevail.
Although the defendants had already been excluded from the process in a previous court decision, the Public Prosecutor’s Office had filed an appeal accepted by the Second Panel of the STJ. After that, the defendants filed motions alleging that the Public Prosecutor’s Office used the incorrect procedural instrument to make the request.
Rapporteur of the case at the STJ, Sérgio Kukina agreed with the defendants’ interpretation, considering that the Public Prosecutor’s Office made a gross error by using appeals (used against sentences) instead of an interlocutory appeal (against an interlocutory decision, that is, which decides part of the process without closing it).
“The STJ understood that the MPF appealed in the wrong way, and could not benefit from ‘tolerance’ (recourse fungibility), because the law and jurisprudence were already clear about the correct appeal. Therefore, the court maintained the exclusion of the defendants from the improbity process”, explains Welington Arruda, master in law and justice from the IDP (Brazilian Institute of Education, Development and Research).
As a result, the court evaluated procedural issues and not the merits of the action by excluding the defendants from the process in the decision that, in practice, closed the administrative case for them, explains Arruda.
“The court concluded that the MPF used the wrong resource — and, therefore, his appeal could not have been accepted.
As a result, the decision that had already excluded the defendants from the process was maintained”, says the expert.
The action is one of others filed in the civil sphere involving the Mensalão, an illegal political financing scheme organized by the PT to guarantee support in Congress for Lula shortly after his arrival as President in 2002.
Dirceu, Delúbio and Genoino have already been held criminally responsible. . Afterwards, his sentence was extinguished based on a pardon received in 2016.
Genoino was convicted in 2012 by the (Supreme Federal Court) with an initial sentence of 6 years and 11 months, later reduced to 4 years and 8 months. He was arrested in 2013 and had . Delúbio was also convicted in the STF, arrested and later granted a pardon in 2016.
