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Brazil’s supreme court has quashed convictions against two high-profile figures targeted by the political corruption investigation known as “Car Wash”, dealing a severe blow to the legacy of the probe that rocked Latin America’s largest democracy.
The court on Tuesday evening overturned a 2017 conviction against José Dirceu, a leftwing politician and longtime ally of president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on the grounds that a limitation period had expired.
A single justice on the country’s top tribunal also annulled rulings against industrialist Marcelo Odebrecht, who in 2016 was found guilty of offences including bribery and money laundering.
Together the rulings are another nail in the coffin of Operação Lava Jato, or “Operation Car Wash”, which began in 2014 and uncovered a multi-billion-dollar kickback scheme that siphoned money from state-controlled oil major Petrobras.
A cartel of construction companies systematically paid bribes to officials and Petrobras executives in exchange for contracts, according to investigators, in what the US Department of Justice once described as the “largest foreign bribery case in history”.
Dozens of politicians and businessmen were jailed, as Car Wash earned plaudits at home and abroad.
However, the methods involved were labelled improper by those targeted, while critics called it a politically motivated witch hunt against Brazil’s left.
A series of recent supreme court orders have threatened to roll back the investigation’s achievements.
By three votes to two, the court on Tuesday overturned Dirceu’s conviction for receiving a bribe from a company that contracted with Petrobras.
He had been sentenced to almost nine years in prison. Dirceu, who had multiple different convictions with jail sentences attached, spent time in and out of prison pending appeals but is no longer behind bars.
As a leftwing activist in the 1960s, Dirceu was deported by Brazil’s military dictatorship and sought exile in Cuba, where he underwent plastic surgery in order to alter his appearance so that he could return to his homeland undetected.
Once considered Lula’s right-hand man, the 78 year-old has another outstanding corruption conviction which is under reconsideration by a separate court. If that conviction too is reversed, it could open the door for him to stand for election.
Odebrecht’s eponymous family enterprise was formerly South America’s largest construction conglomerate. A lower court in 2016 imposed on the executive a 19-year custodial sentence, which was later reduced, and he spent two years in prison before transferring to house arrest, which ended last year.
Those rulings were annulled on Tuesday by Justice Dias Toffoli, who has been accused of seeking to unwind Car Wash. In Odebrecht’s case he found there was “collusion” between the magistrates and prosecutors and that due legal process had been ignored.
“It’s clear there was a mixing of the prosecutorial and judicial functions, eroding the foundations of the democratic criminal process,” the justice wrote in his ruling.
A plea bargain struck between Odebrecht and the court, however, remained intact.
Anti-corruption campaigners said the latest rulings were detrimental to the rule of law in Brazil.
“The destruction of the fight against corruption in the country is relentless,” NGO Transparency International said on X.
Lula, who previously ruled South America’s most populous nation between 2003 and 2010, was himself convicted of corruption and spent 580 days in prison.
However, his sentence was overturned by the supreme court in 2021 on a technicality, allowing the former trade unionist to successfully run for the presidency again the following year.
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