After having his plea bargain with the Federal Police approved by the Federal Supreme Court, in 2018, publicist Marcos Valério, operator of the monthly allowance, gave several testimonies to the Public Ministry. In one of them, he detailed how the relationship of trust with the PT and intimacy with the ex-president Lula which resulted, in 2005, in one of the biggest political corruption scandals of all time.
The approximation with the party would have started well before the 2002 election. “We took companies that were already financing the campaign, they were already helping”, he said. The success in raising illicit money for Lula’s campaign was so great that, in addition to sharing the intimacy of the then president of the Republic, he was promoted to exercise the function of informal adviser to the government, as such he gave opinions on the appointment of ministers and would even have personally appointed one of them. “One of the ministers who were appointed, had our finger, was Walfrido dos Mares Guia, who at the time had no relationship with Lula, but we endorsed this nomination”, guarantees the publicist.
Walfrido dos Mares Guia was Minister of Tourism in the Lula government from 2003 to 2007. Valério says that his “finger” was in the nomination of other high-ranking figures in the government. “After the campaign, we became even closer to President Lula and to power, at the level of being heard for appointments by some ministers”, assured Valério. Asked by prosecutors about the role he played for the PT government, the publicist was incisive: “cash”. A clandestine cashier, stocked with “slush money and parallel money from corruption, bribes and all,” he said.
These “parallel money” and “kickbacks”, according to Valério, were used not only to pay for the party’s expenses, but also to support the perks of many PT members, including then-President Lula. Without naming names, he told who the illegal money was going to: “For deputies, for ministers, for the president’s personal expenses, for all kinds of expenses for the workers’ party, political campaigns.”
Sentenced to 40 years in prison, Marcos Valério is serving his sentence in Belo Horizonte, in an open regime. This week, the Chamber’s Public Security Commission invited the publicist for the second time to give a statement about the PT’s alleged connections with the PCC, reported by him in another chapter of his plea bargain.
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