Brazil’s president Michel Temer calls graft charge ‘soap opera’

BRAS LIA: Brazil’s President Michel Temer defiantly rejected a bribery charge against him as a ‘soap opera’, saying there is no proof and vowing to fight on.

“The charge is a fiction,” Temer said in his first public reaction since the country’s top prosecutor, Rodrigo Janot, filed the corruption charge with the Supreme Court late Monday.

“Where is the concrete proof of my receiving this money?” Temer asked as he made a nationally televised statement at the presidential palace in Brasilia.

Temer attacked Janot for creating ‘ a soap opera plot’ that sought to ‘ paralyse’ Latin America’s biggest country as it tries to exit a painful recession.

“I will not allow myself to be accused of crimes that I did not commit. My intention is to work for Brazil. I will not shirk the battles,” he said.

Temer, the first sitting president of Brazil to face criminal charges, is accused of accepting bribes from a giant meatpacking company. He is also under investigation for obstruction of justice and belonging to a criminal organisation.

If the lower house of Congress votes by a two-thirds majority to accept the charge, the center-right president would be suspended for 180 days and face trial in the Supreme Court.

However, Temer’s aides say they are confident he has sufficient support in the scandal- plagued Congress – where dozens of lawmakers have been caught up in the same sweeping graft probe – to get the charge thrown out.

A source in the presidency, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that the task of securing at least one- third of the votes in the lower house would not be ‘ the end of the world.’ — AFP