Tag Archives: Car Wash

Brazil’s Anticorruption Backsliding

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In a recent post I discussed the positive legacy of Brazil’s Car Wash Operation and argued that this operation, for all its missteps, strengthened the country’s legal and institutional framework against corruption. The operation not only increased public awareness of corrupt practices but also inspired the development of effective tools for corruption prevention, investigations, and case resolution, significantly contributing to a more transparent, honest, and efficient business and political environment. Nevertheless, actions taken by Brazilian leaders in the past year have intensified concerns—already present under the previous Administration—about the government’s commitment to sustaining and expanding this legacy. Transparency International (TI) raised some of these concerns in its recent comment on Brazil’s worsening performance on TI’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI). Now, there are well-known reasons to be cautious about drawing strong conclusions from the CPI or other perception-based international indexes, but in Brazil’s case, there are good reasons to be alert. Senior leaders in both the political and judicial branches have made a series of worrisome decisions that seem likely—indeed, may be intended—to set back Brazil’s fight against high-level corruption. Among those setbacks, the following are the most serious and troubling: Continue reading →

The Perils of Taking Shortcuts: How Brazilian Prosecutors Alleged Carelessness with Evidence May Undo Years of Hard Work 

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Brazil’s so-called Lava Jato (Car Wash) Operation, launched in 2014, exposed one of the largest corruption schemes ever. The investigation resulted in over 361 convictions (for corruption, money-laundering, procurement fraud, and other crimes); among those convicted were numerous prominent members of the Brazilian business and political elite, including the current President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as Lula). In building its cases against these defendants, Brazilian federal prosecutors made extensive use of “leniency agreements,” offering some companies lighter penalties in exchange for evidence against other parties. One of the most important of these leniency agreements was the one Brazilian prosecutors, working in conjunction with U.S. and Swiss prosecutors, reached with the Odebrecht company, a major Brazilian infrastructure conglomerate at the center of the corruption scheme.

But over the last few years, the Car Wash operation has started to unravel, with several of its most important achievements reversed. In 2019 a Brazilian hacker publicized text messages allegedly exchanged between Sergio Moro, the presiding judge in many of the Car Wash cases (including Lula’s), and the Car Wash prosecutors, prompting allegations of bias. The specialized Car Wash prosecutorial task force was disbanded in February 2021, and the Brazilian Supreme Court annulled Lula’s conviction on procedural grounds in April 2021, paving the way for his re-election to a third presidential term in October 2022. The most recent setback to the Car Wash Operation, already discussed and debated on this blog (see here, here, and here), is a decision by the Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli this past September. In that decision, Justice Toffoli declared that, due to procedural errors, none of the evidence acquired in the leniency agreement with Odebrecht could be used in any judicial proceeding. This ruling puts numerous Car Wash convictions at risk: Defense attorneys may now seek to annul convictions in cases in which their clients were convicted primarily on the Odebrecht evidence.

Many in the anticorruption community, in Brazil and abroad, have denounced Justice Toffoli’s ruling, and have suggested that it may have been improperly influenced by political or personal considerations. But as a technical legal matter, Justice Toffoli’s decision was probably correct. While it is understandably frustrating to see so much hard work wiped away and the prospect of convicted corrupt actors going free, the responsibility here appears to lie more with the Car Wash prosecutors than with the Supreme Court. Indeed, the recent developments in the Car Wash saga should serve as a cautionary tale for investigators and prosecutors. In their understandable zeal to catch and convict bad actors, law enforcement authorities must be careful to scrupulously and rigorously observe all legal requirements. Continue reading →