A report drawn up by the Federal Police indicates that the governor of Rio, Cláudio Castro (PL), received undue payments on at least seven occasions between 2017 and 2019, the year in which he held the position of deputy governor of the state. The values, put together, would reach R$326 thousand and US$20 thousand. Such information was cited in Superior Court of Justice Minister Raul Araújo’s decision as the basis for search warrants against Castro’s brother, Vinícius Sarciá, in December last year. The information comes from the RJTV 2 and GloboNews portals. The agent denies the allegations and classifies them as “unfounded, old and rehashed”.
The bribe payments to Castro allegedly began when he was still a Rio councilor, in 2017. He was elevated to the Guanabara Palace after being elected deputy governor, in 2018, on Wilson Witzel’s ticket. With Witzel’s impeachment in 2020, Castro became governor of Rio and, on December 20, 2023, his electronic, fiscal and banking secrecy was violated in Operation Seventh Commandment, at the request of the STJ, the same action that led to searches of the addresses of Vinícius Sarciá.
In the decision of the then minister Raul Araújo, the magistrate states that “there is sufficient evidence of the commission of crimes, the dynamics of which involve the action of Cláudio Castro as a political agent who supports the illicit activities of the legal entities commanded by Flávio Chadud and Marcus Vinícius Azevedo da Silva, in the execution of public contracts”. Chadud is a businessman, owner of one of the companies accused of being part of the scheme. Azevedo, in turn, was Castro’s advisor in the Rio Chamber, said that he had passed bribes to the then advisor and even later, when the politician was already deputy governor, in a complaint. Furthermore, he allegedly handed over evidence of corruption to the Attorney General’s office and was jailed for about a month, in the midst of investigations by the Rio Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Civil Police.
The STJ minister also stressed, according to TV Globo, that Castro received bribes in several places: at home, in the parking lot of a shopping center, at the home of a consultant and at the headquarters of a company with contracts with the state. The then deputy governor also allegedly withdrew amounts from these illicit payments during a trip to Disney, after the alleged bribe was deposited by businessman Flávio Chadud into the current governor’s bank account in Brazil, according to the PF. The STJ decision also reveals, according to Globonews, exchanges of messages in which Castro agreed with two businessmen to deliver bribes.
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The federal-level investigation stems from Operation Catarata, by the MPRJ and the Civil Police, in 2019. The action, at the time, aimed to dismantle a corruption scheme at the Leão XIII Foundation, an institution at the time under the supervision of vice governor Cláudio Castro, who offered services to the low-income population, such as ophthalmological care.
In a note through his advisor, the defense of governor Cláudio Castro “informs that he does not have access to the content of the STJ’s decision and reiterates that the plea of Marcos Vinícius, a self-confessed defendant, is criminal and is already subject to nullity before the Courts Superior, for their absolute inconsistency.”
“It is worth emphasizing that the information is nothing more than unfounded, old and renewed allegations, many of which have already been widely published by the same media. So there are no new facts compared to 2019,” he adds.
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2024-01-18 00:50:00
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