BRASILIA: Brazil’s Supreme Court has ratified a near nine-year prison sentence for ex-president Fernando Collor de Mello, convicted of corruption and money laundering.
Brazil’s first democratically-elected president after a decades-long dictatorship, Collor de Mello was arrested and taken to prison last week to begin serving his sentence.
In 2023, he was found guilty of having received 20 million reais ($3.5 million) in bribes while a senator between 2010 and 2014 to “irregularly facilitate contracts” between a construction company and a former subsidiary of Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras.
He lost an appeal to the Supreme Court last week, a ruling that was upheld in a late-night session Monday by a full bench of that court. His case is one of several to emerge from the sprawling “Car Wash” corruption scandal that implicated dozens of top businessmen and politicians in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.
The investigation uncovered a vast network of bribes paid by large construction companies to politicians to obtain major public works contracts. Collor de Mello, who served from 1990 to 1992, is not Brazil’s first president to fall afoul of the law.
Four of the seven people who have led the country since the 1964-1985 military dictatorship have either been convicted, jailed or impeached. In the latest case, far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro has been ordered to stand trial over an alleged coup plot after losing elections in 2022.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who served two terms between 2003 and 2010, spent a year-and-a-half behind bars in a Car Wash-related case before having his conviction annulled and winning a third term in October 2022.
