Petrobras probe looks to dig up corpse

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4badd072-ff3d-11e4-84b2-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz3alkIKZkx

May 20, 2015 11:54 pm

Petrobras probe looks to dig up corpse

Joe Leahy in São Paulo/FT

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An investigation into corruption at Petrobras took a macabre turn on Wednesday as Brazil’s Congress sought to exhume the corpse of the scandal’s alleged political mastermind to quell suspicions that he might still be alive.

A congressional inquiry into the alleged bribery scheme at the state-owned oil company has applied for a court order to dig up the remains of the late ruling coalition politician José Janene, amid allegations he might have faked his own death in 2010.

• A spokesman for Hugo Motta, the member of the PMDB party of the ruling coalition who serves as president of the congressional inquiry, said: “[Mr Motta] has received information that the congressman José Janene is alive and is living in a country in Central America.” He did not reveal the source of the information.

Wednesday’s move marks a bizarre twist in Brazil’s largest corruption probe, in which politicians — mostly from the ruling coalition of President Dilma Rousseff — have been accused of consorting with former Petrobras executives and contractors to extract billions of dollars from the company.

The scandal, which Petrobras estimates has cost it R$6.2bn in direct losses from kickbacks and bribery, has undermined the popularity of the Workers’ Party-led government and crippled the country’s oil and gas and construction sectors.

It has also captivated the Brazilian media with its allegations of secretive meetings between black-market money dealers, politicians and company executives in Rio de Janeiro’s beachside hotels, and officials making trips to Switzerland to launder billions of dollars of ill-gotten public funds.

Prosecutors have handed the Supreme Court a list of 54 political figures suspected of involvement — many of them from Mr Janene’s former grouping, the Progressive Party.

Mr Janene, who had been thought to have died in São Paulo at the age of 55 from heart disease in 2010, was also accused by prosecutors of receiving money in an earlier scandal, known as the Mensalão. In this, the ruling coalition was alleged to have using public money to buy votes in Congress.

Mr Janene’s alleged role in the Petrobras corruption scandal was outlined in testimony from a black market money dealer, Alberto Youssef, as part of leniency agreements signed with prosecutors and made public by the federal court in the southern state of Paraná.

Mr Youssef accused the late politician of being responsible for setting up the bribery scheme at the company, which has an overwhelmingly dominant position in the oil and gas industry in Latin America’s largest economy.

The congressional commission is also expected to call on Mr Janene’s widow Stael Fernanda Janene to give testimony before it, according to the spokesman for Mr Motta.

Globo News, the Brazilian broadcaster, quoted Mr Motta as saying that the late congressman’s widow had not seen his body before it was buried — fuelling suspicions the corpse might not have been his.

Mr Motta wants to compare the DNA of the exhumed corpse with a member of Mr Janene’s family.

Mr Janene’s widow could not be reached for comment. But domestic media reported that she rejected of Mr Motta’s claims, saying she and her family had given the politician, a Muslim, an Islamic funeral.

This latest intrigue is not the first instance of someone linked to the Petrobras scandal being suspected of faking his own death.

In in evidence submitted to prosecutors, police have speculated that another black market dealer — a businessman from the northeastern state of Ceará — faked his own murder in a mugging.

He later turned up as an underworld figure operating between Europe and Brazil.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015