Although the federal congress is in recess until mid-February, ‘Operation Car Wash’, the official investigation into corruption at the state-owned oil firm Petrobras, rumbles on. On 7 January, the Brazilian daily O Estado de São Paulo published phone conversations and text messages from 2012 to 2014 in which the current cabinet chief, Jaques Wagner, asked for election campaign donations from the now-imprisoned former president of OAS, a major construction firm. This week, both former president Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and President Dilma Rousseff faced accusations of using top posts in BR Distribuidora, a subsidiary of the state oil company Petrobras, as rewards for political support. The fear in the presidential palace is that these accusations, though not criminal, may have some indirect bearing on the impeachment process when it resumes next month.
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