The Fresh York Times

July 7, 2017

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s Federal Police announced this week that it would shut down a crusading anticorruption task force, drawing a rebuke from prosecutors who warned the budge could throttle investigations that have exposed systemic corruption among the country’s political and business elites.

The decision comes as President Michel Temer, who is among the politicians facing criminal charges stemming from the unit’s work, is scrambling to shore up support among lawmakers to avoid trial over bribery allegations.

The Federal Police, which announced the shift on Thursday, characterized it as a bureaucratic reshuffling of personnel and resources that would increase efficiency. In a statement, it said that members of the team known as the Lava Jato, or Car Wash, task force would be absorbed into the organization’s main anticorruption division to more effectively “fight against corruption and money laundering and facilitate the exchange of information.”

Members of the task force, the country’s national association of prosecutors and the federation of Federal Police officers scoffed at that rationale.

Lava Jato prosecutors issued a statement calling the decision a “clear setback” for a team that is in the process of reviewing mounds of evidence and prioritizing scores of fresh leads.

Since its establishment in 2014, the group, based in the southern city of Curitiba, has operated with a remarkable degree of autonomy, upending a deeply rooted system of kickbacks and patronage that cut across the country’s political and business classes. Its investigations have reverberated well beyond Brazil, as evidence and cooperating witnesses have exposed bribery schemes at prominent Brazilian companies that had major business projects across the Americas.

The investigation, which embarked as a routine inquiry into money laundering at a gas station, has ensnarled Petrobras, the national oil company, along with more than two hundred eighty people, including scores of lawmakers and some of Brazil’s wealthiest magnates. Hundreds more remain under investigation. Lava Jato investigators have recovered more than $Three billion in ill-gotten gains and say they could comeback billions more to the treasury if they are given adequate time and resources.

Leonardo Coimbra, who has run the Federal Police since 2011, has given the Lava Jato unit a remarkable degree of independence even as it brought down powerful figures, including the former speaker of the House, Eduardo Cunha, who was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in March.

In May, Mr. Temer appointed Torquato Jardim, a close political ally, to run the Justice Ministry, which oversees the Federal Police. Mr. Temer, who assumed power last year following the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, was charged last month with accepting a $152,000 bribe from a top executive at a food conglomerate. Prosecutors have said they could file extra charges against Mr. Temer in coming weeks.

The president, who has denied all wrongdoing, is at the grace of lawmakers. Under Brazilian law, two-thirds of the lower house of Congress must sign off on referring his case to the Supreme Court, the only venue where senior elected officials can be criminally attempted.

Eloísa Machado de Almeida, a law professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas University in São Paulo, said the closure of the task force was clearly intended to weaken investigations that stand to ruin some of the country’s most powerful studs.

“If Lava Jato doesn’t manage to hold accountable the political class — especially those in power now — it will have served only to turn power from one political class to another, without delivering the institutional reforms we expected from this kind of investigation,” Ms. Machado de Almeida said.

A spokesman for Mr. Temer said the president does not interfere with the “internal affairs” at the Federal Police, but would not say whether he was aware of the stir.

The National Federation of Federal Police Officers, a union, voiced concern about the dissolution of a task force that it called in a statement “the most successful operation of the Federal Police.”

Absorbing members of the team into the broader investigative apparatus, the statement said, will make them subject to “excessively bureaucratic procedures” that they have been spared from to date. “You don’t switch a winning team!” the federation said in its statement.

Paula Moura contributed reporting from São Paulo, Brazil.

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