Five billion

Image: Tima Miroshnichenko
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By GERSON ALMEIDA*

Who among us would ratify an agreement like this?

The magistrate's question echoed in the plenary of the National Council of Justice (CNJ), amid the reading by judge Luiz Felipe Salomão of the results of six months of work by the magistrate's office at the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, commanded by Daniela Hartz, the judge who replaced Sérgio Moro, when he resigned from his position as judge to take over the Ministry of Justice in the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

The agreement investigated “was constructed in a confidential and illegal manner”, and the former judge, Sérgio Moro, judge Daniela Hartz and the former public prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, then coordinator of Lava-Jato, would have “acted in a manner proactively and improperly assumed the role of representatives of the Brazilian State with Petrobras and the North Americans”, according to the Federal Police report published on the website Power360, one of the documents that supports the decision of the CNJ inspector.

The magistrate's decision is supported by more than a thousand pages of documents and evidence obtained during his inspection, which allowed him to categorically state “that everything was done with absolute secrecy, level 3, without any transparency”; and the analysis of the dates of meetings and visits by American prosecutors to Brazil confirms a meticulous preparation for “the implementation of this multibillion-dollar embezzlement”. Resources that were consciously manipulated “apart from legality, in a confidential manner and without administrative morality” to circumvent the country’s true legal representatives and establish a body of “first instance as being Brazil”.

After detailing the maneuvers carried out until the agreement was approved by judge Daniela Hartz, the magistrate once again paused reading his decision and asked his peers another question: “and the money that was paid to the USA also went to a private institution , or did it go to the coffers of the American State? A question that, at the same time, is an answer that irrefutably demonstrates the collusion that was taking place, which was only not completely consummated due to the STF's reaction.

This prevented the approximately five billion from being diverted from the State and allocated to the private foundation that those investigated were determined to create. With the foundation, they wanted to ensure ironclad private control over these voluminous resources of the Brazilian State, which would only be possible through the corruption of legality and morality, an obligation of all public agents.

The magistrate's vote is so rich in details and so abundant in evidence, which turned the defense's argument that the collusion was nothing more than “an unfortunate initiative”, in a poor attempt to infantilize Judge Gabriela and her henchmen. On the contrary, the magistrate demonstrated that there was a conscious action with a view to appropriating public resources for a private institution, as “it was agreed with the American to apply the fine abroad so that (the money) could return and be allocated to the foundation” and The way to make this deviation possible was the agreement approved by judge Gabriela Hartz.

After this dive into the “absolutely chaotic management” of the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, based on abundant supporting documentation – including testimony from Gabriele Hartz herself who declared that she knew it was not within her competence – the magistrate was fully prepared to state that “I don’t have the slightest doubt about the judge’s participation in the diversion of public money to the desired foundation.”

The vote was so vigorous that minister Luís Roberto Barroso, president of the CNJ, had to change the usual procedure and voted immediately afterwards to try to persuade his peers and opened dissent to the magistrate's vote and expressed a position against all removals, without entering into the merit of the accusations and highlighting his lack of knowledge of the entire report made by the CNJ corrections office.

Luís Roberto Barroso's arguments in relation to Gabriela Hartz were the lack of urgency and the fact that she is no longer in the 13th Court, in addition to being against monocratic decisions for this type of case. There was no lack of another touch of infantilization in the judge's actions when she stated that “this girl had no blemishes in her career to be summarily dismissed”, as if it were her previous life and not a specific case involving billions in money and a relationship with a foreign country. outside the law that was under analysis.

Even though Luís Roberto Barroso's statement was emphatic to the point of characterizing the removal of the magistrates as “the measure was illegitimate and arbitrary” and he defended the revocation of all of them, the vote in the plenary gave him a minimum advantage of 8 x 7 against the maintaining the separation of Gabriela Hardt and Danilo Pereira Júnior; and the removal of judges Thompson Flores and Loraci Flores (TRF-4) was maintained with an elastic majority of 9 x 5, in favor of the magistrate's position.

As for the opening of an Administrative Process against everyone, despite Barroso having asked for views, some favorable votes were anticipated and the majority built by the removal of the TRF-4 judges suggests that they will hardly stop being subjected to the administrative process, during which the work of the internal affairs department must impose itself.

In short, the CNJ's decision is historic and represents that, little by little, some of the most important institutions of the Brazilian justice system are resuming a functioning marked by due legal process and determined to contain the authoritarian outbursts that took over Lava-Jato and of important sectors of the Brazilian judiciary, which still compete and are strong, but no longer have the dominance over the agenda and public opinion that they once had.

*Gerson Almeida, sociologist, former councilor and former secretary of the environment of Porto Alegre, he was national secretary of social articulation in the Lula 2 government.


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