“IF I talk, there won’t be an election,” Paulo Roberto Costa, a former executive at Petrobras, was supposed to have warned. Now Mr Costa (pictured), arrested in March in a money-laundering probe involving Brazil’s state-controlled oil giant, has started talking. Polling day in Brazil, now less than a month away, will not be cancelled. But if what he says is true, it could affect the outcome.
According to revelations published in Veja, a leading weekly, and Estado de São Paulo, a newspaper, Mr Costa, who ran Petrobras’s refining division from 2004 to 2012, has accused more than 40 politicians of involvement in a vast kickback scheme. The list reportedly includes a minister, three state governors, six senators and dozens of congressmen from President Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT) and several coalition allies. The beneficiaries are alleged to have pocketed 3% of the value of contracts signed with Petrobras in return for supporting the government in congressional votes.
The federal police, who have been taking Mr Costa’s testimony since August 29th, have yet to confirm or deny the press...Continue reading
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