Brazil’s top court suspends Cunha – architect of Rousseff impeachment drive

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Thursday suspended Eduardo Cunha, the powerful lawmaker at the centre of efforts to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, for trying to obstruct a probe into his alleged corruption. The speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress is the architect of the impeachment drive expected to force Rousseff to step aside from office on Wednesday. Cunha’s dramatic setback was not expected to change the momentum against Rousseff. But it was yet another sign of how Brazilian politics has descended into a whirlpool of corruption scandals and instability. Despite facing criminal charges including bribery and hiding money in Swiss bank accounts, Cunha has survived months of attempts by prosecutors and a congressional ethics committee to see him brought to justice. A master backroom political operator, he is widely seen as the key figure in getting the impeachment proceedings green-lighted by the lower house in April and sent to the Senate, which will vote Wednesday on opening a trial and suspending Rousseff. But the man Brazilians refer to as a real-life Frank Underwood – the corrupt US politician in the hit Netflix series “House of Cards” – appeared finally to have been brought down by Justice Teori Zavaski. The judge said that Cunha had obstructed justice “to prevent the success of investigations against him.” Rousseff ruefully welcomed her arch-enemy’s fate. “Better late than never,” she said. “The only thing I regret ... is that he was able to sit there stone-faced and preside over these shameful [impeachment] proceedings in the lower house.” Cunha insisted he was not going away without a fight. “There is no chance I will resign,” a spokeswoman quoted him as saying. The ruling was a surprise, coming hours before the full Supreme Court was due to consider a separate attempt to have Cunha removed. The timing reflected concerns on the Supreme Court that with Rousseff likely being suspended and replaced by her vice president, Michel Temer, next week, Cunha would have moved up to first on the presidential succession list. Zavaski said Cunha lacked the “minimum personal requirements” to be speaker of the house. “That qualifies him even less for substituting as the president of the republic,” he said. Prosecutors had long asked for Cunha to be brought to trial in the Supreme Court – which handles all cases against high-ranking politicians – but the court was said to have been wary of suspending him earlier, while the impeachment battle was in full gear in the lower house. Cunha’s removal is considered unlikely to help Rousseff much, since she has already been badly weakened and her case is now in the hands of the Senate. Rousseff is accused of manipulating government budget accounts with illegal loans, a charge which she describes as technical and not worthy of impeachment. If she is suspended she will be put on half pay pending the outcome of the trial, which could take several months. Cunha is accused of taking bribes as part of the massive corruption scheme centred on Petrobras, the huge state oil company. Dozens of politicians and top executives have been charged or in some cases already found guilty and jailed. Cunha, who rejects the charges, is also being investigated by the congressional ethics committee over allegedly lying to Congress about possessing secret Swiss bank accounts. Highlighting the seemingly endless circles of corruption scandals engulfing Brazil, the congressional deputy who is next in line to replace Cunha as speaker, Waldir Maranhao Cardoso, is himself being investigated for alleged Petrobras-related crimes, including money laundering. Meanwhile, Temer, who has been named by cooperating witnesses as involved in the Petrobras scheme but is not being formally investigated, faced a new legal problem of his own on Thursday. After being found guilty earlier this week by an electoral court of breaking campaign finance rules, he risks being barred from seeking elected office for eight years, a spokesman for the court told AFP. The ban however does not affect his current position – or his likely rise to become acting president next week. A conservative member of Brazilian politics’ growing Evangelical wing, Cunha belongs to the centre-right PMDB party, which used to be the key partner in a shaky ruling coalition led by Rousseff’s Workers’ Party. The PMDB wounded her when it broke away and decided to back impeachment. Temer is also from the PMDB, and Rousseff has accused him and Cunha of using the impeachment process to bring her down in a “coup”.