Brazil uproar after hush money claim
BRAZIL President Michel Temer reeled from a report that he had authorised payment of hush money to a jailed politician – a scandal threatening to plunge Latin America’s biggest country into a political meltdown.
Demands for his impeachment and new elections sprang up overnight from opposition politicians, while small crowds protested in Sao Paulo and Brasilia, shouting: “Temer out.”
In another blow for the veteran leader of the centre-right PMDB party, his key ally, Senator Aecio Neves, of the PSDB party, was targeted by anti-corruption police with raids yesterday.
The media said the Supreme Court had suspended him from office and was to rule on a request for his arrest.
Temer, 76, faces two immediate problems.
The first is his political survival and the second the survival of ambitious austerity reforms which he has said were needed to whip Brazil’s floundering economy into shape.
He was due for meetings with party leaders, to try shore up his base in Congress, where he has solid backing, despite being unpopular with the public.
Temer, who took over after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff last year, was reported to have been secretly recorded agreeing to payments of hush money to Eduardo Cunha, the disgraced former speaker of the lower house of Congress.
According to a report – which Temer immediately denied – the president discussed the matter with Joesley Batista, an executive from the meatpacking giant JBS, on March 7.
Batista told Temer he was paying money to make sure Cunha – thought to have encyclopaedic knowledge of Brazil’s notoriously dirty political world – would keep quiet while serving his sentence for taking bribes.
The report said it was a plea bargain between Batista and his brother, Wesley, with prosecutors.
Temer allegedly told Batista: “You need to keep doing that, OK?”
Temer’s office said: “President Michel Temer never solicited payments to obtain the silence of former deputy Eduardo Cunha.”
The scandal is the latest shockwave from a “Car Wash” graft probe ripping through Brazil over politicians who took bribes to get big businesses overinflated contracts with state oil company Petrobras.