Operation Car Wash: Investigating corruption at Brazilian oil company Petrobras

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/01/brazil-operation-car-wash-is-this-the-biggest-corruption-scandal-in-history

by dredmorbius • 9 years ago

46 20 9 years ago

theguardian.com

amuricaburner• 9 years ago

none of this would have been possible if Brazilian court justices lost their minds and considered limitless political contributions free speech

thefinalboss• 9 years ago

Wow, this tale is worthy of several movies and it seems they are just scratching the surface!

woliveirajr• 9 years ago

It's funny to see how the "House of Cards" twitter even mocks themselves, in portuguese. In the middle of all the Brazilian impeachment, mr. Underwood was appreciating some moves. Then, last week, they said they can't compete with Brazilians real life. No screenwriters would be creative enough to turn that into a plot.

andrenth7• 9 years ago

As a Brazilian, I find the writing in this article disgusting. I know the BBC (edit: not BBC, The Guardian) is often seen in good light here, but this piece goes through extreme lengths to distort reality to try to save the workers' party reputation.

verytrivial• 9 years ago

Sorry, how does this Guardian article related the BBC?

andrenth7• 9 years ago

My mistake. My fingers were not wired to my brain before coffee.

jdright• 9 years ago

As a Brazilian, I find this writing highly accurate and extremely well behaved and impartial. It is not trying to save the workers' party reputation, it is reporting facts.

andrenth7• 9 years ago

Please see my reply to dmichulke for my opinion on that.

dmichulke2• 9 years ago

Well, if "they're all entirely corrupt but PT provided the necessary legislation" equals "saving the worker party's reputation", then you're right :)

In all other cases I'd say this is a hopeless mess and it doesn't matter who you'll vote for next time.

andrenth7• 9 years ago

It is true that they are all corrupt. However the level of corruption introduced by the workers' party is unprecedented. It's not merely corruption for personal gain, as in most other cases, but to support a project that had the goal of maintaining them perpetually in power. We are talking about the party who use Brazilian taxpayer money to fund other left-wing totalitarian governments in Latin America and Africa.

The article opposes the former and current governments as if they weren't elected together; it's morally broken to the point of saying corruption "allowed the party to get things done"; it says the investigation made the economy worse, as if it wasn't corruption that broke the economy, but unveiling it; it says previous administrations had commited the same administrative crimes as Rousseff's, which is plain fake news; it claims it's unclear Rousseff and Lula have obtained personal gains from corruption, while that is perfectly clear, especially in Lula's case; the "shelver-in-chief" narrative is straight from the worker party's collection of slogans and the current attorney general is not much different: why is Temer being investigated with such speed for his leaked recordings, while Roussef's leaked recordings, which were much more damning and showed clear intent of obstruction of justice resulted in nothing?

The article then insists on the narrative that taking Rousseff out was part of a plan to stop the Car Wash operation. That's fake news again, and The Guardian reports slogans from the workers' party as if they were facts. The truth is that they did and are still doing everything they can to stop the investigations, including the many attempts of character assassination of judge Moro and the Prosecution Office.

Finally, it ends by questioning if Car Wash was worth it because it helped bring down the workers' party government (clearly a good thing) and "and ushered in an administration that appears just as tainted", which is, again, fake news. Car Wash didn't (and couldn't) usher in any administration. The new administration was elected together with the previous one, and as the law dictates, Temer, as the elected vice-president, was made president. The questioning of whether unveiling the world's largest corruption scheme in history was "worth the pain" shows how broken and biased this piece of reporting is.

RodericDay• 9 years ago

Dude, your posting history makes you seem like an ultra die-hard libertarian:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=andrenth

You may want to check on that before you accuse the notoriously anti-Corbyn Guardian of having some kind of "Worker Party" allegiance.

Seems more like they're being even handed, while you absolutely need Roussef and co to be considered worse than capitalist-style corruption.

andrenth7• 9 years ago

Thanks for labelling me on a subject you have no understanding.

"Roussef and co worse than capitalist-style corruption"? They are not worse, they are the state of the art in that. Who do you think most of the corruption money went to for 13 years? Now, what you call "capitalist-style corruption" I call "cronyism", which is something that could be avoided by design if we didn't have a big government who is able to select "national champion" companies, as put by the article, who are leveraged with taxpayer money and pay back with bribery.

rabboRubble2• 9 years ago

Can you point us to a more balanced report of this case? Hopefully in English!

andrenth7• 9 years ago

This is an ok summary, although it gets some facts wrong (e.g. They mention the PPS party as a member of the ruling coalition and bribery recipient, but PPS was in fact an opposition party. They probably meant PP, which was a government ally. Brazil has 35 political parties, most being "socialist this" or "progressive that", I guess it's easy to be confused): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-05-08/brazil-s-...

This one is more recent and also recent: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-25/brazil-s-...

This link includes parts of an interview with the prosecutors and judge Moro: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brazil-operation-car-wash-involv...

g-adamante• 9 years ago

Update: The guy who was investigating Teori Zavascki's death was murdered yesterday.

Giroflex• 9 years ago

Not true. It was the guy who originally registered the case, but he didn't actually investigate it, that is in someone else's hands.

dredmorbius• 9 years ago

"Clarification" rather than "Not true" would be a far more charitable way of stating this.

Story: http://veja.abril.com.br/brasil/delegado-que-abriu-inquerito...

Translated to English:

The delegate Adriano Antonio Soares , the Federal Police in Rio de Janeiro, was killed early on Wednesday in Florianopolis, after exchange of fire in a nightclub in the capital of Santa Catarina. Soares was responsible for opening an investigation into the death of Federal Supreme Court (STF) Minister Teori Zavascki , who died in a January crash.

That ... sounds sufficiently close to what was posted above to be considered "substantively true".

Operation Car Wash: Investigating corruption at Brazilian oil company Petrobras

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