The statements of Maluf Cardoso, one of the Brazilian witnesses who make up the “star trio” in the Odebrecht case, aroused a tense atmosphere and hostile reactions among defense lawyers and prosecutors in the courtroom.
At the end of the technical defense of the accused Conrado Pittaluga, One of the lawyers forcibly threw a pencil at the place where the head of the special prosecutor for the persecution of administrative corruption (Pepca), Wilson Camacho, was sitting., as he returned to his place next to his client.
The incident came after Cardoso, whose mother tongue is Portuguese, demonstrated in a built-in defense document that he could read Spanish, which contradicts the point he had previously made in court when he said he did not “speak” the language.
When asked by Pittaluga’s lawyers about the language in which the text was written, the Brazilian witness answered that “In Portuguese, but here it says that the material produced was requested from the Public Ministry and that it is in Spanish”.
A few minutes earlier, the Public Ministry had shown the witness a letter written in a language he apparently did not know, which had been signed by him as a lawyer for the Brazilian construction company.
When reading the letter Cardoso admitted that he does not speak SpanishHowever, he said he felt “comfortable” and “confident” in what he had signed because of “the lawyers we have here.”
In the letter, signed by Cardoso on May 24, 2018, Odebrecht delivered all the documentation extracted from the Drowsys system to the General Prosecutor’s Office as part of a collaboration agreement.
The witness also admitted that not all transactions recorded in the Drowsys system were illegal activities.
Cardoso said he had been in contact for five years with the technology system run by the Odebrecht structured operations sector, which he was able to access with the expert company GR Compliance.
He did not identify the illicit payments to Pittaluga
By reading the document, Pittaluga’s defense tried to reject the accusations of the Public Ministry regarding the alleged bribe given by Odebrecht to Aragon Business Consulting, owned by your client.
After showing him the evidence alleged by Pittaluga, the “star” witness in the corruption case repeatedly pointed out that the company that is viewed in the document as the beneficiary is Aragon Finance Corp and not Aragon Business Consulting.
“Is there a payment made by Clinfield (an offshore company used for bribery) to Aragon Consulting?”, The lawyer asked Cardoso, to which he answered “no”.
During the intervention of the Public Ministry, the lawyers insisted on asking the witness about the company of the accused Pittaluga, arguing that in the document “there were two companies with the name Aragon”, however, Cardoso never identified the company in question.
You don’t know the facts about the Dominican Republic
During his testimony, Cardoso admitted “that he did not know the facts about the Dominican Republic”, since He only acknowledged a letter he signed in 2018 certifying the documents delivered to the PGR.
Odebrecht acknowledged that it had paid $ 92 million in bribes in the country to obtain public works contracts.
Cardoso, who participated in the leniency agreements signed between Odebrecht and Brazil, said he had nothing to do with the agreement with the Dominican Republic, except for the letter that has his signature.
The process continues
With the statements of the Brazilian Marcelo Hofke, which start on Thursday, at 2:45 in the afternoon, the trio of witnesses of one of the biggest corruption cases that the country has ever known ends.