Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes criticized remarks made by former judge Sergio Moro regarding the return of auction funds from the Guarujá triplex apartment.
The latest legal friction surrounding the high-profile Operation Car Wash asset centers on a Federal Court decision. That ruling ordered the return of 2.4 million Brazilian reais to the OAS construction company, representing proceeds from a 2018 auction of the property.
The apartment in the Solaris building had long been attributed by prosecutors to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula spent 580 days in prison following convictions that were later annulled by the Supreme Court.
Following the recent court order, Moro defended his past rulings on social media. He argued that the triplex money was given to OAS only because higher court nullifications were purely formal and political, leaving no legal cause to keep the funds seized from a property still registered to the firm.
“Diante da anulação das condenações criminais de Lula por motivos formais e, a meu ver, políticos, a Justiça cível entregou o dinheiro resultante da venda do triplex à OAS, pois não havia causa jurídica para mantê-lo apreendido e o imóvel permanecia registrado em nome da OAS,” said Sergio Moro, senator and former federal judge, as reported by Valor Econômico.
Mendes fired back publicly against those assertions.
“A sentença do caso triplex não foi anulada por meros detalhes processuais. Sergio Moro foi declarado suspeito diante de provas robustas de que, em conluio com o então coordenador da força-tarefa, Deltan Dallagnol, manipulou o sistema de Justiça para alijar o atual presidente da República da disputa eleitoral de 2018,” said Gilmar Mendes, Supreme Court Minister.
Mendes pointed to intercepted messages from the Spoofing operation as evidence of coordinated procedural acts between the judge and prosecutors. He also cited measures such as Lula’s coercive deposition and the public release of plea bargain testimony on the eve of the 2018 election.
“O que houve foi uma fraude que, até hoje, envergonha o Judiciário brasileiro,” Mendes added in his public statement, describing the past proceedings as a political theater.
President Lula, participating in the COP31 climate conference in Turkey, addressed the matter during a broadcast on Thursday, November 12. He demanded formal apologies from media organizations that reported the property belonged to him.
“Fiquei 580 dias preso dizendo que o apartamento não era meu. Agora que a Justiça decidiu que o apartamento não era meu, eu só espero que as pessoas que me acusaram e as pessoas que falaram durante anos que o apartamento era meu pedissem desculpa,” said Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, as reported by CartaCapital.
The Workers’ Party issued a statement maintaining that the recent judicial release of the auction funds validates its position that the property never belonged to the president or his family. Meanwhile, legal proceedings and accountability measures stemming from the era of the task force continue through the Brazilian court system.
