09/15/2024 – 20:15
The decision by Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino to authorize the Lula government to remove expenses resulting from actions to combat fires from the spending limit of the framework and the fiscal target was viewed favorably by the Attorney General’s Office (AGU).
“Minister Dino adequately and fairly addressed the issue of the applicable fiscal rule by recognizing the exceptionality of the climate emergency that Brazil is facing,” he told Estadão/Broadcast the chief minister of the AGU, Jorge Messias. “This is a courageous and necessary decision by the Supreme Federal Court, which will certainly help the government in the numerous actions that are already underway.”
As anticipated by the Estadão/Broadcast On Friday the 13th, Dino had already given signs that he intended to allow the Executive to open extraordinary credits to combat what he classified as a “forest fire pandemic”. With this, he authorized the federal administration to make expenses outside the spending restrictions established by the framework.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will issue a Provisional Measure opening an extraordinary credit to reinforce efforts to combat fires in the country. The amount has not yet been defined, but it is expected to be at least R$500 million. The fires started in the Pantanal and the Amazon, but the devastation spread to other states, such as São Paulo, affecting 58% of the Brazilian territory.
Although the legal consultancy of the AGU at the Ministry of Planning maintained that “any extraordinary credit opened for the prevention and combat of fires (…) will impact the primary result of the year”, Messias intended to file a petition with the STF, this Monday, 16, clarifying this reading.
In the AGU’s understanding, if extraordinary credit were opened for actions to combat fires without a court decision authorizing expenses to be made outside the limits of the framework, the government would be forced to cut spending that has already been greatly reduced or even adjust the fiscal target.
THE Estadão/Broadcast found that Messias will not file another statement because he believes that Dino’s decision resolved the matter. Last week, the AGU also highlighted that, in the case of payment of court orders (debts arising from court rulings), the Supreme Court had already determined that compliance with the decision would dispense with “observance of any legal and constitutional limits or fiscal, financial or budgetary conditions applicable to payment”.
With that decision by the STF, which overturned the so-called PEC dos Precatórios, the Lula government regularized the payment of R$90 billion in precatórios last year and adopted new procedures to account for these expenses within the fiscal framework.
Previously, the proposed constitutional amendment that had been approved by the Bolsonaro government postponed this disbursement, creating a ceiling for the settlement of court orders.
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