Bolsonaro, summoned this Wednesday to a police questioning about the Saudi jewels and other gifts

Former President Bolsonaro at his party headquarters last Thursday as soon as he returned from the United States to Brasilia. LIBERAL PARTY (via REUTERS)

The Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro has an appointment this Wednesday afternoon at a police station in Brasilia for the first interrogation among the dozens of investigations to which he is the subject.

The Federal Police have summoned him to ask him about jewels valued at millions of euros that he received from the Saudi royal family and tried to keep and about other gifts received while he was president of Brazil (2019-2022).

The far-right, who for the first time in 33 years does not have parliamentary or presidential immunity, returned from the US less than a week ago, where he had been installed since the end of his term.

Bolsonaro must appear before the police just one day after his beloved Donald Trump entered history as the first former US president to be charged, in his case, for 34 crimes.

Bolsonaro has returned to his homeland with the intention of leading the conservative right and opposition to the government of leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

But for now that role is limited to sending a few tweets boasting of actions promoted during his term.

He has not starred in public events for now.

There are so many cases that he faces and the organizations that investigate him that everything indicates that defending himself against the multitude of accusations that weigh on him is going to keep him quite busy.

The former president has never hidden his fear of ending up in prison, as happened to the former president of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez, whose case he often recalled in the campaign.

And also to Lula, who was imprisoned for more than a year for a corruption case that was later annulled and that separated him from the electoral race that Bolsonaro won in 2018. He recently admitted in public that some of the ongoing investigations could translate into a disqualification sentence for eight years that prevents him from running for the next presidential elections in 2026. Anderson Torres, a police commissioner who was Minister of Justice in the Bolsonaro government, has been jailed since January for his alleged complicity in attacks on the powers of Brasilia as he was the political head of the security forces that did not prevent the invasion,

The matter of the jewels is his most recent headache, which is added to investigations for encouraging the coup assault of thousands of Bolsonaristas on Brasilia, for the alleged genocide of the indigenous people in a pandemic, for giving false information about the voting system to the diplomatic corps accredited in Brasilia during the electoral campaign.

What happened to the Saudi jewelry and other gifts is a convoluted plot that reads like a soap opera.

The protagonists are, together with the ex-president, three sets of jewels, including a chopard diamond necklace with its corresponding certificate of authenticity, a white gold Rolex watch, cufflinks, a rosary... with which the Saudi royal family wanted to present Bolsonaro and mrs.

When the news broke, the matter was seasoned with other juicy details.

The entourage of the Minister of Energy introduced the jewels without declaring them or paying taxes, and they were discovered

by efficient customs agents at the São Paulo airport.

Along with that confiscated gift right there, there were two other lots of jewelry that turned out to be in the possession of the Bolsonaros.

The former president, who at first denied everything, later acknowledged that he had them and, speeding up the deadlines, has returned them to the authorities.

The revelations published by the Brazilian press have revealed that he kept almost a hundred gifts, including some as striking as a semi-automatic rifle or a massage chair.

Thanks to journalistic investigations, we also know that the former president engaged ministries, other public bodies and his closest aides in multiple and unsuccessful efforts for more than a year to get the customs service to deliver the batch of Saudi women's jewelery to him. , the most valuable, estimated at three million euros.

In his last attempt, he sent an assistant on a military flight from Brasilia to the Sao Paulo airport to beg the official to let him take the package because those had to be resolved before the arrival of the next president.

There were days left for the relief.

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