00:00Brazil's Supreme Court has requested the start of a money laundering investigation into the
00:05financing of a biopic on far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro.
00:09Our correspondent Brian Mir has more details.
00:14Forty-four days after Intercept Brazil published audio conversations in which far-right presidential
00:19candidate Flavio Bolsonaro asks jailed former Banco Master President Daniel Vorcaro to hurry
00:26up with the 121 million reais he'd promised to secretly donate to a Texas production company
00:32making an election season biopic about ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, Supreme Court President Edson
00:38Faxin has officially requested Brazil's Attorney General to open a criminal investigation.
00:46Flavio Bolsonaro's defense team strategy is to delay the Dark Horse investigation until
00:52after the elections.
00:53The audio recordings of Flavio telling Daniel Vorcaro, brother, I will always stand by
00:59you, were released on May 13th.
01:01Since then I've been going into the Supreme Court at the federal police headquarters every
01:07day urging them to get started.
01:09So finally the Supreme Court has announced that Minister André Mendoza will request that
01:14the Attorney General open an investigation.
01:19Daniel Vorcaro is currently in jail accused of selling billions of reais in federally insured
01:24toxic assets to small investors in the largest financial corruption case in Brazil's modern
01:29history.
01:30A long-time Bolsonaro family ally, his brother was Jair Bolsonaro's biggest campaign contributor.
01:36The fact that Minister Faxin has nominated a Bolsonaro appointee, Justice André Mendoza,
01:42to oversee the investigation, has many people worried, as does the fact that it took so long to
01:47get started.
01:51Why did it take a workers' party congressman to request that the Attorney General's Office, or
01:57the Supreme Court, take charge of this investigation, given that the facts and the evidence, even
02:03if not in the hands of the federal police, and we actually are not entirely sure about that,
02:08have been in the hands of the press for over six weeks?
02:11This evidence should have triggered a federal police investigation immediately, so why was
02:17this not done on their own initiative?
02:21Brazil's presidential elections will take place on October 4th.
02:24Brian Meir, TELASUR, São Paulo.
Comments