Lula loses case against IstoÉ reporters and will have to pay R$150,000
The Court of Justice of São Paulo (TJ-SP) denied, this Wednesday (9), a request for compensation of R$ 1 million from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) against the magazine That is reporters Sérgio Pardellas and Germano Oliveira and a source called Davincci Lourenço de Almeida. With the decision, the president must pay R$150,000 in fees to the defendants’ lawyers.
The process began in 2017, after the publication of a cover story with the title “I took a suitcase of money to Lula”. In the publication, Lourenço, presented as a “bomb witness”, claims to have transported a suitcase of money in 2012 to a third person, who in turn would pass it on to the PT member.
According to the magazine, the amount would be to pay for assistance in a R$100 million contract between the construction company Camargo Corrêa and Petrobras. The interviewee would be close to members of the company’s top command and would be in charge of “special missions”.
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The recordings take place this morning at Granja do Torto, one of the official residences of the Presidency of the Republic. The Chief Executive returned to using the location for meetings with authorities in December 2023
He would have taken the suitcase – with a value that he was unable to provide – from the contractor’s hangar, in São Carlos, in the interior of São Paulo, to the headquarters of an air taxi company that would also be owned by Camargo Corrêa at Congonhas airport. , in the capital of São Paulo. The amount would have been handed over to an employee of the aviation company, who would pass the amount on to the then former president.
“The money was in a bag, in the suitcase. I left the bag with the money, but the suitcase is with me to this day”, Davincci told IstoÉ.
Lula’s lawyer at the time, Cristiano Zanin, now a minister of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), declared in the action that the allegations were “lies and invented by a fraudster who aimed to obtain moments of instant fame”.
The defense also argued that the source used by the magazine had a vast history of lies and mentioned a video in which the interviewee stated that then-president Dilma Rousseff had ordered the Zika virus to divert attention from the alleged crimes she was committing.
“No serious and responsible journalist would publish a barrage of offenses and untruths coming from a person with Davincci’s history without any element of corroboration,” says the action.
In court, the reporters and the magazine maintained that the interviewee was close to the family that owned the construction company and that Lula was trying to disqualify him. Furthermore, they argued that the statements made sense in the context of the time and that they did not make any direct accusation, just publicizing the interview.
When rejecting Lula’s request, the TJ-SP judges considered that the report was “informative in nature, with the identification of the source and without personal opinions”.
The case’s rapporteur, judge James Siano, highlighted that, at the time, “there was no concrete evidence of falsehood in the information disclosed” and that the publication respected legal limits. Siano also stated that Davincci should not pay compensation to Lula, as he only reproduced, in an interview, facts that he reported to the police authorities.
The president can still appeal the decision. When contacted by Estadão, the Presidency’s Social Communication Secretariat did not respond to the contact.
