The speaker of Brazil’s lower house of congress has been charged with receiving £3 million in bribes in the latest dramatic turn of the oil company scandal that is shaking the country.
Eduardo Cunha, 56, is one of the most powerful politicians in Brazil as well as an evangelical Christian radio commentator. He is accused of taking the bribes as part of a deal to build two drilling ships for Petrobras, the state-owned oil giant which is at the centre of a multibillion-dollar scam in which construction companies and oil executives inflated contracts and passed cash to politicians.
The Petrobras investigation has rocked the political elite and deepened an already painful recession, prompting hundreds of thousands to demonstrate last week calling for President Rousseff to be impeached.
The political and the economic crises are converging, with Mr Cunha, who denies any wrongdoing, having threatened to back impeachment calls against Mrs Rousseff and blocking her attempts to pass economic reforms. His departure from the political scene would ease the president’s efforts to tackle the ailing economy, prompting him to say the charges against him were political. However, serving members of congress can only be convicted by the Supreme Court, which can take years.
The newspaper Noticias quoted prosecutors who alleged that some of the bribe money was funnelled through accounts of the evangelical Universal Church of God, which recently built a $300 million replica of King Solomon’s Jerusalem temple in Sao Paulo.
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The Petrobras case has led to the arrest of some of Brazil’s most important business leaders, and three dozen sitting politicians are under investigation.
As well as charging Mr Cunha, prosecutors also indicted the former president, Fernando Collor de Mello, who had been Brazil’s first democratically elected leader after two decades of military dictatorship but whose term ended in 1992 with his resignation after impeachment on corruption charges.
The exact nature of the recent charges was not disclosed, but last month prosecutors seized luxury cars worth more than £1 million from his mansion.