Enlarge image
Brazilian President Bolsonaro: He knew about the allegations
Photo: ADRIANO MACHADO / REUTERS
It was almost midnight when Brazilian Senator Renan Calheiros stepped in front of the cameras.
Exhaustion was written on his face, but Calheiros beamed like a general who had just won a decisive battle when he announced that this day would "go down in our history."
Calheiros has been heading a parliamentary committee of inquiry for a few weeks now, which is investigating why the coronavirus is raging worse in Brazil than in the rest of the world.
The interrogations, which usually revolve around the government's lack of interest in obtaining vaccines, follow many Brazilians like a telenovela.
The ten-hour session, however, which ran at prime time on Friday last week, was a crime thriller that has the potential to actually give the history of Brazil an unexpected turn.
Not only Calheiros believes that it could be the beginning of the end of President Jair Bolsonaro.
But one after anonther.
No other vaccine was anywhere near as expensive
That day, two brothers sat on the podium at the front of the committee, Luis Ricardo and Luis Miranda.
Luis Ricardo, a man with horn-rimmed glasses and thinning hair, has been in charge of strategically relevant imports in the logistics department of the Ministry of Health for ten years.
Because he had accompanied a delivery of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine from Miami to Brasilia that night, he had come straight from the airport to the Senate.
Luis, his older brother, who came with a Bible and wore a bulletproof vest under his blue pinstripe suit, has been a member of Congress for three years.
He's actually a Bolsonaro-based man.
What the two of them had to report gave the nation an inkling of how this increasingly weakened president is now holding on to power.
Luis Ricardo had noticed a few things at the Ministry that had to do with the purchase of the Indian vaccine Covaxin. His house had signed a contract for the purchase of 20 million cans, priced at $ 15 each; the total volume was 1.6 million reais, the equivalent of around 270 million euros. No other vaccine Brazil has obtained has come anywhere near as expensive.
In addition, before the deal was concluded, Brazilian diplomats noticed that the Indian laboratory Bharat Biotech had offered the same vaccine at significantly lower prices elsewhere. Luis Ricardo, who checked everything for correctness at the end of the chain of command, found it strange that the purchase should apparently be handled by a third-party company based in the tax haven of Singapore, whose name did not even appear in the contract. Apparently, the money was supposed to be prepaid, even though the vaccine was not yet approved, and unlike the Pfizer / Biontech case when its ministry simply ignored dozens of emails from the company, things should now be quick. Luis Ricardo's superiors apparently put pressure on. Again and again, he said in front of the committee, he had received messages and calls,late at night, on weekends. It seemed strange to him.
Why suddenly this rush?
Why this price?
It smelled of corruption.
Bolsonaro promised to involve the federal police
Because he didn't know who to turn to, he says he confided in his brother, who has a direct channel into the presidential office.
On March 20, a Saturday, they personally reported their suspicions to Bolsonaro at a meeting in his residence.
They had given him the news and sales contracts, and Bolsonaro had fired them with the promise to take the matter over to the federal police.
But this, so much is clear today, never happened.
When Bolsonaro, who had been a backbencher in parliament for almost three decades, ran for president in 2018, he presented himself as an outsider who wanted to break with the customs of "old politics". Bolsonaro wanted to clean up the corrupt livestock market in Brasilia, where parties and politicians traditionally get lucrative posts for obtaining majorities. Today, three years later, there is hardly anything left of this intention.
Bolsonaro's son Flavio, who was elected to the Senate in 2018, recently bought a villa in the capital that he cannot actually finance with his state salary alone. The public prosecutor's office suspects him for years as a member of the state parliament in Rio de Janeiro to have collected the wages of dozens of employees who were employed in his office. When former corruption judge Sergio Moro resigned from his post as Justice Minister last year, he said he could not tolerate Bolsonaro blocking police investigations to protect his family.
A few days ago, Bolsonaro's Environment Minister Ricardo Salles submitted his resignation.
Salles, whom Bolsonaro had defended to the last, is accused by the prosecutor of having issued export permits for large quantities of illegally felled Amazon trees.
The investigators also found atypical sales on his accounts.
What seems to be growing these days is the image of a government mafia attacking the institutions of the state.
And for the first time, the allegations are aimed directly at the president's palace.
Miranda dropped another bomb
The Miranda brothers' appearance came in a week that had not started well for Bolsonaro. On Saturdays tens of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets to demonstrate against a corona policy that has killed half a million people. Then new polls were published that predicted a clear victory for former President Lula da Silva in next year's presidential election. Finally, MP Luis Miranda dropped another bomb.
Miranda told the committee that in the course of their personal interview, Bolsonaro had mentioned a politician whom he suspected was behind the purchase of the vaccine.
The senators kept trying to get the name out of him, but Miranda said he couldn't remember.
Senator Alessandro Vieira, who was once a police officer, tried to be a
bad cop
by throwing Miranda on the head for being more cowardly than his brother.
Senator Simone Tebet tried empathy.
He needn't be afraid, she said.
The whole country is at his side.
Then it was boiled soft.
Miranda uttered the name of Ricardo Barros and burst into tears. "You have no idea where I'm going now," he said. “To blacken a president who everyone thinks is correct and honest. He knows that something is wrong and does nothing. But ... what kind of president is he who cuddles up to a corrupt man? "
Ricardo Barros, the MP Miranda named, is one of those ideologically flexible central politicians who have been quietly revolving around power in Brasilia for years. For several months he has been organizing majorities in Congress on behalf of the government. In March, just before the Covaxin deal was about to go through, he passed a bill that would allow the vaccine to be imported without authorization from the regulatory agency. Barros also has close ties with the brokerage company that was supposed to handle the purchase. In 2017, when he was serving as Minister of Health for Bolsonaro's predecessor Michel Temer, his house had ordered medicines from the same provider for several million euros that were never delivered. The head of the logistics department who allegedly urged Luis Ricardo Miranda toWaving through the overpriced purchase of the Covaxin vaccine was then placed by Barros in the ministry.
The price that Bolsonaro has to pay
Barros, that much is certain, is an influential man.
His party, the Progressistas, to which the President of Parliament belongs, is part of a group with which Bolsonaro made a pact last year to protect himself against impeachment.
Senator Tebet recently told the newspaper "O Globo" that the president was her hostage.
The fact that he violates his duty and turns a blind eye to their crooked dealings is the price Bolsonaro has to pay to stay in office until next year's election campaign.
In May, when he knew about the allegations long ago, he found Barro's wife a well-paid supervisory board position in Brazil's largest hydropower plant, Itaipu.
Like Barros, Bolsonaro denies having anything to do with the matter. It is impossible to have a complete overview of what is going on in the ministries, he growled the days. Luis Ricardo Miranda, the civil servant who is serious about the fight against corruption, threatened his employees with charges of alleged forgery of documents. The Covaxin contract has since been canceled, although the government continues to claim that nothing really went wrong.
Nevertheless, there are increasing signs that a system is behind the irregularities. It seems as if politicians and employees of the Ministry of Health, for whom the procurement of certified vaccines had little priority before, wanted to use the growing desperation of the population to quickly and at inflated prices in an opaque market.
This became clear when the committee of inquiry saw the next film-ready appearance on Thursday. On the podium this time was a man who, as a negotiator for a drug company called Davatti, offered the Ministry of Health 400 million doses of AstraZeneca. In exploratory talks he had with department officials, the man said he was asked to add a dollar to each dose. Even if nothing ever came of this business - among other things because Davatti lacks a sales license for AstraZeneca vaccines - the government has yet to explain again.
With every session, with every detail they bring to light, the Senators increase the pressure on Bolsonaro. And so in the end it could be that it is not half a million Covid 19 victims that give him a headache, but the criminal business in the slipstream of the pandemic. On Friday, the Attorney General announced that he would start investigations against Bolsonaro.
