Temer’s close aide held in probe
Brasilia, June 4: A close adviser to Brazil’s President Michel Temer was arrested in Brasilia on Saturday, the police said, in the latest move in a corruption case that threatens to bring down his government.
The police filmed the aide, Rodrigo Rocha Loures, in March running from a Sao Paulo pizzeria parking lot to a taxi with a black suitcase containing about $152,500.
The judge who ordered Loures’ incarceration is leading the Supreme Court’s investigation into a sprawling pay-for-play corruption case at state oil giant Petrobras that already has swept up many in Brazil’s political and business elite.
It now threatens to bring down Mr Temer, who is fighting calls for his impeachment as prosecutors build a corruption and obstruction of justice case against him.
Mr Temer was drawn into the scandal last month with the release of an audio recording secretly made by an owner of the world’s largest meatpacking company, Joesley Batista, at a late night March 7 meeting with Mr Temer at his residence.
In the recording that Mr Temer says has been tampered with, the President allegedly gives the OK for payments to buy the silence of a politician imprisoned in the Petrobras scandal, Eduardo Cunha, the former speaker of the lower house. Mr Batista turned over the audio recording to prosecutors, and said that Mr Temer had designated
Loures to receive bribes in return for favours to the company. The police filmed Loures with the bag full of money that allegedly came from a contact at Batista’s JBS meatpacking company