The Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating how to finance the electoral campaign for the 2015 PSD legislative, led by Pedro Passos Coelho, reports Saturday. The investigation has been underway since 2017, but this week was attached to the EDP case.
The Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP) received documentation from Brazilian entities that point to payments from the construction company Odebrecht, involved in the Lava Jato process, to the main publicity officer in the campaign, the Brazilian André Gustavo. The publicist, who managed the communication for the social and democratic campaigns of 2011 and 2015, was eventually arrested in 2017 on suspicion of intermediation of the construction company’s bribes to, for example, Aldemir Bendine, the former president of Banco do Brasil and Petrobras.
That same year, the DCIAP asked for the collaboration of the Brazilian authorities, who had seized a spreadsheet at the offices of the Brazilian construction company with the registration of the various bribes paid in cash at the company’s headquarters. In the document, one of the code names, “Príncipe” (whose identity remains unknown), had associated an annotation referring to the Baixo Sabor dam, in the district of Bragança.
Fernando Migliaccio, the former head of Odebrecht’s bribery department, confirmed deliveries for the project in northern Portugal and identified André Gustavo as the person who “visited Odebrecht’s headquarters in São Paulo specifically to collect payment of the amounts related to” works in Portuguese territory, quotes Saturday.
After analyzing the accounts of André Gustavo’s advertising company, Brazilian researchers concluded that it is possible to “identify that payments billed ‘from the inside’ by Arcos Propaganda [a empresa de Gustavo] for the PSD and the coalition Portugal à Frente they totaled 868 thousand euros and were made in the same period and in values very similar to the transfers in kind made ‘outside’ ”by Odebrecht.
Thus, and with the exception of the “indicative” nature of the evidence, the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office informed the DCIAP that the payments described as referring to the Baixo Sabor dam project were, in reality, for the financing of the Pedro Passos Coelho and PSD campaign 2015. André Gustavo, however, guarantees the legality of the services provided in Portugal.
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