Workers' Party lower house leader expects Rousseff ouster bids to be dismissed

Ricardo Berzoini, head of the Government Secretariat; Sibá Machado, leader of the ruling Workers' Party (PT) at the Chamber of Deputies, and other members of the party coordination spent more than three hours at a meeting at Palácio do Planalto Monday (Oct. 12). Berzoini had been with President Dilma Rousseff and other ministers earlier at the presidential residence, Palácio da Alvorada, to discuss the political agenda for the week.

A spokesperson for Berzoini further confirmed that he had dinner with allied senators in the evening. The meetings took place the day before lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha was due to review petitions to impeach Rousseff filed with the Chamber of Deputies. Seven of these requests are pending review, one of them filed by jurist Hélio Bicudo, former deputy and one of the founders of the PT.

Sibá Machado said that the party is convinced that there are no grounds for an impeachment case and expects Cunha to shelve the requests. “I think he's going to shelve them. But if his decision is appealed, the issue will become a political matter”.

Although he regards Bicudo's impeachment petition as “weak and inconsistent”, the PT leader does not rule out the possibility of an opposition attempt to append a report to the ouster petition in which account prosecutors say the government violated the Fiscal Accountability Act in 2015. However, in his view, the prosecutors' finding lacks “substance”.

Sibá Machado also said that the Workers' Party is to take a stance today (13) on the charges that emerged from the Operation Car Wash corruption probe against the lower house speaker for receiving $5 million in kickbacks for Petrobras contracts.

Translated by Mayra Borges

Relacionadas

Chief of Staff condemns use of impeachment as political weapon