Outgoing Rio de Janeiro mayor Marcelo Crivella, an ally of Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, has been arrested and charged with corruption.
Four carloads of police and prosecutors arrived at the mayor’s house in the affluent Barra da Tijuca neighborhood before 6 a.m.
Prosecutors later filed allegations of corruption against Crivella and 25 others, saying in a statement that wiretapping, seizure, witness statements and cooperative witness statements had “revealed a well-structured and complex criminal organization led by Crivella that had been acting in City Hall since 2017.”
The arrest comes days before Crivella’s mandate expires and just weeks after the highly unpopular mayor – a gospel singer who called homosexuality a “ terrible evil ” and shunned carnival – was beaten in mayoral elections by one of his predecessors, Eduardo Paes.
Crivella is an evangelical bishop and former senator who served as the minister of fisheries in Dilma Rousseff’s government. He is the cousin of Edir Macedo, who founded the powerful evangelical church Universal Church of God. Mauro Macedo, Edir Macedo’s cousin and Crivella’s former campaign treasurer, was also charged and arrested.
“This is political persecution,” Crivella told reporters when they reached police headquarters. “It was the government that fought most against corruption.” He hoped for justice, he said. Police also arrested businessman Rafael Alves, the mayor’s’ man of confidence ‘who had a City Hall office but no official role, the G1 site said – Alves’ brother Marcelo was Rio’s main tourism. Former police officer and city councilor Fernando Moraes was also arrested, G1 said.
Prosecutors began investigating a “ business counter ” that was reportedly operating in City Hall in 2019, O Globo reported in December 2019, after money changer Sérgio Mizrahy signed a settlement. He alleged bribes were paid to bolster City Hall contracts and get outstanding debts.
In court documents authorizing the arrests, Judge Rosa Guita said prosecutors had described Crivella as “ the boss of a criminal organization in which the other accused participated, installed in the scope of Rio de Janeiro City Hall with the aim of getting into most cases in different ways ”.
Prosecutors had shown that Alves was carrying out schemes that Crivella was aware of, authorized and benefited from, Guita wrote. “The crimes were committed permanently during the four-year mandate, with fraudulent contracts and bribes in the widest range of sectors of the administration,” she wrote.
The last months of Crivella’s administration were tumultuous. In September, an investigation by TV Globo found that city hall employees, known as “Crivella’s guardians,” were paid to stand outside hospitals and prevent citizens from complaining about health care. Crivella said there was no basis for the charges.
But to the long-suffering residents of Rio, the news that another politician had been arrested came as no surprise. Former Rio State Governor Sérgio Cabral is serving a prison sentence for corruption. His successor Luiz Fernando Souza – known as “Bigfoot” – was released from prison a year ago. Rio’s last governor, Wilson Witzel, was suspended in August for alleged Covid-19-related graft. He has denied the charges. “Like other governors, I may be used politically,” he said at the time.
Crivella’s arrest is a blow to Bolsonaro, whose childhood home is in Rio. Bolsonaro won the 2018 election on an anti-corruption platform and backed Crivella’s reelection attempt in a video that the two men shot together. The two men danced together on stage at an Evangelical Christian event in Rio last February.