The first judge to speak out in the trial that could impeach senator Sergio Moro (União Brasil-PR), judge Luciano Carrasco Falavinha, from the TRE (Regional Electoral Court) of Paraná, voted to dismiss the request this Monday (1st).
The session was subsequently closed, and the trial will resume on Wednesday (3).
Lawyers for the PT and PL, the parties that filed the lawsuits against Moro, criticized the position of Falavinha, the case’s rapporteur. For him, there was no excessive spending in Moro’s pre-campaign and no abuse of economic power, as alleged by the acronyms behind the actions.
“It was a vote that, for us, is quite wrong on several premises. I think he ends up accepting a lot of excuses from Moro to erase the truckload of money he injected into his pre-campaign”, he told Sheet Luiz Eduardo Peccinin, PT lawyer.
“The rapporteur’s vote was quite complacent on a very delicate point, where he disregarded the expenses of a presidential campaign, as if they were expenses that could not be counted due to an abuse of economic power”, said Bruno Cristaldi, lawyer for the PL.
“This sets a very dangerous precedent for people running for a position with a much higher campaign ceiling, knowing that they can make an expense that will not be counted in a subsequent campaign,” he said in a press conference after the session.
Gustavo Guedes, Moro’s lawyer, in turn, said that Falavinha’s vote is in line with what the defense supports.
“He [voto do relator] comes in line with the defense, in the sense that all expenses should be individualized and analyzed one by one. What the author parties tried to do was to bring together, unify all these expenses to make them much larger,” he said.
“We hope that the rapporteur’s vote will continue following the vote. The expectation is that it will end on Wednesday.”
The PT and PL representations, which are being processed together, point out that the parliamentarian had made excessive expenses during the pre-election campaign linked to the 2022 election, which the senator’s defense denies.
For the authors, Moro’s campaign for the Senate benefited from the pre-campaign for the Presidency of the Republic, when the former judge of Operation Lava Jato was at Podemos.
The rapporteur said he disagreed with these arguments, as well as the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which had presented an opinion for the revocation. “There is no seriousness in the acts and expenses that were demonstrated in the pre-campaign, there is nothing that would have caused imbalance or advantage to those investigated”, he said.
“Understanding that these values would be an abuse of power is hyperbole that the law does not contemplate.”
One of the controversies throughout the process is the definition of what expenses would or would not be pre-campaign. In the calculation made by the Public Ministry, they reach, at least, just over R$2 million – still lower than the sums made by PL and PT. Moro’s defense spoke of expenses of R$ 141 thousand.
Throughout his vote, Falavinha brought the sum of around R$224,000 for Moro’s pre-campaign activities for the position of senator. As argued by the former judge’s defense, the rapporteur understood, for example, that only expenses incurred in Paraná should be considered.
He further assessed that different expenses could not be included, such as expenses that ended up not being effectively paid or security services.
The rapporteur also said that, to prove the author’s acronyms’ thesis, that pre-campaign expenses should all be added together, it would be necessary to certify, among other items, that Moro had the deliberate and declared intention, from the beginning, of being a candidate to senator in Paraná.
“Candidacies are not born overnight. They are built on a daily basis, within the parties”, he argued.
The TRE court is made up of seven judges. Judge José Rodrigo Sade, second to vote, asked for a review (more time for analysis), stating that he would resume his vote in next Wednesday’s session. The agenda for April 8th is also reserved for the Moro case in court.
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If convicted, the former judge will lose his mandate and become ineligible from 2022 onwards, which would make it impossible for him to run for office until 2030. Furthermore, new elections would be held for the Senate seat.
The possibility of a new election for the vacancy has moved Paraná politics in recent months, with the main parties studying possible candidates for the dispute.
Regardless of the result in the TRE, an appeal can be made to the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), and any effects of the decision will only become valid after the appeals have been exhausted.
