An Olympic-Sized Bribery Scandal Crashes Down on Rios Former Mayor Eduardo Paes
An Olympic-Sized Bribery Scandal Crashes Down on Rio’s Former Mayor Eduardo Paes
Eduardo Paes was supposed to be the future of Brazilian politics. Not anymore.
By Dave ZirinTwitterTODAY 11:44 AM
In the summer of 2016, Rio’s then mayor, Eduardo Paes, was the political face of Brazil’s Summer Olympics. The country had been plagued by bribery and corruption scandals, with former president Dilma Rousseff recently impeached and her replacement, Michel Temer, so unpopular that he could not even show up to a funeral for fear of being booed. Paes was presented to the world as the cleanest man in the slop house.
He was built for an international audience: a glib, global mayor as comfortable doing a TED Talk or confabbing with Michael Bloomberg about the future of the global city as he is drinking beers with Rio’s favelados. Social activists who saw him as the face of displacement of the poor raised their voices, but were drowned out by the praise for someone spoken about as a future president.
But now everything might come crashing down. Brazil’s Supreme Court, in its ongoing corruption investigations, seems to be closing in on Paes. According to a list leaked to the Estadao newspaper, the court has decided to open investigations into the former mayor. According to the leak, one of Odebrecht’s informants alleges that Paes received R15 million (about $4.8 million) in payments from a conglomerate to help “facilitate” Olympic contracts.
Paes’s spokeswoman, Tereza Fayal, denied the allegations, calling them “absurd and untruthful.” She said, “He vehemently denies that he has accepted bribes to facilitate, or to benefit, the interests of the Odebrecht company.”
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https://www.thenation.com/article/an-olympic-sized-bribery-scandal-crashes-down-on-rios-former-mayor-eduardo-paes/
