A Brazilian senator charged in a massive corruption investigation centered on state oil company Petrobras has accused a minister in President Dilma Rousseff’s government of trying to buy his silence, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The senator, Delcidio Amaral of the ruling Workers’ Party (PT), told investigators in statements given as part of a plea bargain that powerful minister Aloizio Mercadante contacted him via an aide to urge him not to testify.
Amaral, the former party leader in the Senate, said the minister told his aide he was conveying the message on behalf of Rousseff herself.
The senator gave investigators recordings of conversations between the aide and Mercadante, who is currently education minister and was previously chief of staff to Rousseff.
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Amaral was in custody at the time, himself accused of pressuring a former Petrobras director not to talk to investigators in the corruption case.
The senator should “keep calm,” Mercadante says in one recording, warning him he could bear “monumental responsibility in destabilizing the government” if he talked to investigators.
In his confession, Amaral said Mercadante “told (the aide) that financial issues, and specifically paying for lawyers, could be resolved, probably through companies linked to the PT.”
Mercadante denied the accusations in a press conference.
“I want to repudiate this attempt to involve me in cases that are not consistent with the democratic rule of law in Brazil,” he said.
Amaral turned over the recordings in exchange for a lighter sentence — the kind of deal prosecutors have used to implicate a steadily expanding list of powerful politicians and business executives in the spiraling scandal.
