The great case of mother corruption of the Mexican political system that promoted the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is at risk of collapsingand Emilio Lozoya, former director of Pemex, could get rid of corruption accusations for having received bribes from the Brazilian construction company Odebrechtand dozens of politicians from PRI and the BREAD, involvedwatch how, without doing anything, the accusations against him fade away.
The beginning of that potential end occurred last week in Brazil, when the president of the Supreme Court, José Dias Toffoli, annulled all the evidence that the Brazilian prosecutor’s office obtained through a series of agreements with the executives of Odebrechtwhose acts of corruption discovered in Operation Lava Jato (car wash), impacted a dozen countries and caused the overthrow of presidents in Peru and Panama, and produced judicial consequences in several nations, where, like Mexico, it was used for politicians.
Dias Toffoli acted at the request of President Luis Inazio Lula da Silva, who slept 580 days in prison after being convicted of corruption and money laundering at Petrobras, but within the framework of Operation Lava Jato, accusations that were based on the evidence offered by Odebrecht, which were finally annulled. The ruling was criticized by Sérgio Moro, Toffoli’s predecessor, who headed the anti-corruption operation and put Lula in jail, arguing that corruption in the president’s Workers’ Party was real, and that they had pocketed little more than one thousand 200 million dollars.
Toffoli annulled the leniency that Moro gave to Odebrecht executives in exchange for their accusatory statements, and pointed out that the evidence was useless in any area or degree of competence, the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper chain reported on Tuesday.
The president of the Supreme Court responded indirectly to Moro, who today enjoys immunity because he is a senator, occasionally extending to other defendants, who received the invalidation of Odebrecht’s evidence, and a few days ago, to strengthen his decision, he prohibited the use of any documentation presented by the construction company in exchange for privileged treatment, in all judicial processes in Brazil.
The evidence and accusations of the executives of Odebrecht involved in Operation Lava Jato are now invalid in Brazil, but the Supreme Court ruling has not been extended to other nations that have open judicial proceedings against former officials, as is the case of Lozoya in Mexico. He former director of Pemex was accused by Luis de Meneses Weyll, who was the general director of Odebretch in Mexico, and that he admitted in a confidential testimony before the Brazilian Prosecutor’s Office before officials of the then Attorney General’s Office of the Republic of Mexico, that he had been responsible for paying the bribes to Lozoya.
Meneses Wyell stated that in 2010 Odebrecht contributed $500,000 to the Veracruz governor’s campaign, and noted that in 2012, Odebrecht paid six million dollars to Lozoya “in recognition of what he had contributed to us (facilitating their participation in a project in Tula and Veracruz), and with my intention and commitment” to the importance he would have in the government of Enrique Peña Nietowho appointed him director of Pemex.
Lozoya was denounced for irregularities by the then Secretary of the Treasury, José Antonio Meade, and the then director of Pemex, José Antonio González, but it was not successful in the Attorney General’s Office. When López Obrador assumed the Presidency, his team thought that they could take advantage of Lozoya as the quality witness, using the criterion of opportunity, to accuse a good part of the economic cabinet of Peña grandson and the former PAN presidential candidate, Ricardo Anaya.
The then legal advisor to the Presidency, Julio Scherer, and the attorney general, Alejandro Gertz Manero, before entering into a brutal confrontation, worked to offer Lozoya the criterion of opportunity. Scherer made the first approach and Gertz Manero negotiated directly with Lozoya, who had gone to live in Spain, with his father. They sent him a list of the PEÑista officials they wanted him to indict. The burden of proof was not important, because basically the case was not judicial, but political, and although the cases were falling, Anaya still lives in self-exile in the United States and one of his lieutenants, Jorge Lavalle, is prisoner.
Lozoya was never able to provide Gertz Manero with solid evidence to document the main case of corruption that they wanted to build against past governments, and he remains in jail. The allegations that Odebrecht’s money went to Peña Nieto’s campaign and to buy the will of the BREAD so that he could walk without problems Pact for mexicocould not be sustained, and Meneses Wyell’s statements contradicted it.
Completely unexpectedly, things are changing with the Dias Toffil ruling. There was a preamble in 2021, when the Supreme Court began to consider the use of data from the payment and accounting systems presented by Odebrecht within the collaboration agreement as invalid, but the invalidation of a crucial part of the evidence provided by the company’s informants, such as Meneses Wyell, increased the expectations of that accused former officials be exonerated. Recently, as a side effect, the justice system prohibited the use of Brazilian witnesses in the trial against former President Ollanta Humala.
What is happening in South America will allow Lozoya’s defense to explore whether, as in Peru, they can go to the Mexican courts and enforce Toffil’s ruling, so that the statements of the witnesses who accused him, all of them Brazilians. , are invalid. In any case, it will be a difficult path to travel. He has done a lot of political damage to the government of Lopez Obrador that Odebrecht has not produced what they offered to the Mexicans, so that everything ends with a dismissal of the Lozoya Case. It would be ridiculous that neither the president nor the prosecutor will accept.
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