Leniency agreements were signed when the company was still called Odebrecht; magistrate ruled in favor of J&F in a similar case at the end of 2023
Like what the J&F at the end of 2023, the Novonor (formerly Odebrecht) asked Minister Dias Toffoli, of the STF (Supreme Federal Court), to provisional suspension payment of installments of a leniency agreement in the amount of R$3.8 billion. The order was placed on Tuesday (9.Jan.2024). The information is from the newspaper The globe and was confirmed by Power360.
The process is being carried out in secret. This is an agreement signed with the Federal Public Ministry in 2016. At the time, it was agreed that the company, which was the target of Lava Jato investigations, would pay the billion-dollar fine to authorities in Brazil, the United States and Switzerland. When contacted by this digital newspaper, Novonor said it would not comment on the case.
On December 20, 2023, Toffoli had already provisionally suspended the payment of R$10.3 billion referring to a leniency agreement signed by J&F with the Public Ministry in 2017.
At the time, the minister understood that the evidence obtained in the Federal Police Spoofing operation raised doubts about the voluntariness of the agreement – which goes against what the law says for agreements like this – and allowed J&F to have access to the evidence, something that Novonor is also trying to achieve this.
Toffoli wrote, in his decision, that J&F must be able to assess, given the evidence collected in Spoofing, whether there was a conflict of interest for “determine the selective disposal of assets and companies, as well as the value of the fine to be borne by the applicant”.
In September, before J&F's request, Novonor had asked the STF to maintain the leniency agreements even after Toffoli ordered the annulment of the evidence presented by the contractor and which served as the basis for Lava Jato. Read the complete of the minister's decision (PDF – 803 kB):
LENIENCE AGREEMENTS
The leniency agreement is a mechanism in which companies that committed acts harmful to the public administration collaborate with the investigations and undertake to pay the amounts stipulated in the contract, reimbursing the agreed amounts to the public coffers. Additionally, organizations must establish integrity improvement programs internally.
Odebrecht signed 2 leniency agreements in Brazil:
- in 2016, with the MPF (Federal Public Ministry), worth R$3.8 billion (R$8.5 billion adjusted for inflation over 20 years of payment) – which should be shared between the MPF itself, the US Department of Justice and the Swiss Attorney General's Office. Here's the complete of the agreement (PDF – 2 MB);
- in 2018, with the AGU (General Attorney's Office of the Union) and the CGU (General Comptroller of the Union), in the amount of R$2.7 billion (R$6.8 billion adjusted for inflation over 22 years). As of this Saturday (January 13, 2024), only R$172.7 million had been paid, according to the CGU data panel. Here's the complete agreement (PDF – 318 kB).
After the agreements, the group had to enter into judicial recovery and undergo restructuring.
OPERATION SPOOFING
The operation was launched in 2019 to investigate hackers which disclosed exchanges of messages between the former coordinator of Lava Jato in Paraná, Deltan Dallagnol (Novo-PR), and the former judge (and now senator) Sergio Moro (União Brasil-PR), in the episode that became known as “Vaza Jato”.
The conversations obtained by the invaders served as support for the defense of several people investigated – and arrested – by Lava Jato, such as the president himself. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT). On June 14, 2023, the STF prohibited the destruction of evidence obtained from Moro and Dallagnol's cell phones.
One of the hackers involved in Vaza Jato is Walter Delgatti Neto, arrested in 2019 on suspicion of hacking into authorities' Telegram accounts, including that of Sergio Moro when he was already Minister of Justice and Public Security in the Jair Bolsonaro government.
In 2023, when he was out of jail, Delgatti stated that he started working for the federal deputy Carla Zambelli (PL-SP) in 2022 and that he received from hacking the devices of STF minister Alexandre de Moraes. He was heard at the CPI on January 8th.
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