Sambodian City Hall | Malufists Pay It Backward

City Hall fought the law and the law won …

Another bit of good news gleaned from the Portal ClippingMP

55 former city aldermen, among them mayor Gilberto Kassab, will have to return R$ 5.3 million to the public coffers, reports the Estado de S. Paulo.

Three private citizens persisted for 16 years to bring about the result.

Mayor Kassab continues to remain in office — correct me if I am wrong on this — only because of a stay preventing him from being impeached for campaign finance irregularities. And yet no one else seems to find this insane.

I try not to avoid getting involved in local political debate, but Mr. Kassab remains a grotesque reminder of Malufism, the political movement of the late eighties and early nineties that spawned him.

Maluf is the extraordinarily corrupt ex-mayor and ex-governor who is subject to immediate arrest in New York City by order of the Distrcit Attorney there. Said Robert Morgenthau at the time, “We are not running some Grand Caymans on the Hudson here, after all.”

After 17 years, a court sentenced 55 ex-aldermen from the Sambodian City Hall  to return  R$ 5,3 million to the public coffers. The sum represents salary payments between 1993 and 1994 that exceeded the constitutional limit — city legislators by law can receive no more than  75% of teh salaries of state lawmakers. No futher appeal is possible.

Among those sentenced was mayor Gilberto Kassab (DEM), five currently serving aldermen, two commissioners of the Municipal  Tribunal of Audits and former aldermen Vicente Viscome and Hanna Garib, both accused of involvement in the Máfia of the Inspectors, a bribery scandal dating from 1998. Each defendant will have to repay R$ 95,000 on average, although the exact value can still be contested. They will also have to pay off R$ 533,000 in court costs.

There was a Mafia of the Inspector scandal just last year, in Brás. This is a permanent scheme in which city inspectors overlook lack of documentation in return for regular bribes from camelôs, or informal street vendors — who will sell you the latest movies cheaper than it would cost you to rent them.

I remember this latest outbreak of Mafia Scandalism because my immigration lawyer at the time was arrested as part of it. Gold chains, gold bracelets, expensive cologne in excess, the whole experience.

The civil suit dates from 1994. The plaintiffs, three residents of Lapa, in the Western Zone, questioned the forumula used by council members to calculate their own pay raises. Based on a wrongful interpretation of Resolution No. 05– the members of that council (1993-1996) were exempted from income tax.the state prosecutor nvestigated whether there were irregularities in the procedure leadingto the pay hike.

.

Caught | Rotten Rio Cops

Brasilianas.Org reports: arrest of high-level police officials for corruption

I told you this would happen: as state police move to secure territory in shantytowns where drugs and gambling rackets have enormous power to corrupt, they would do so under the watchful eye of federal police.

I translate, rapidly and carelessly.

RIO – More than 350 federal officers are on the streets of Rio this morning serving 45 arrest and 48 search warrants on state judicial and military cops accused of corruption, robbery and involvement with drug gangs.  PF investigations indicate that the police arrested were playing a double game, tipping drug gangs to police operations against them.

One of the criminals tipped off was allegedly Antonio Bonfim Lopes, known as Nem, who heads a drug gang in Rocinha and Vidigal. In September  2009, he was forewarned of a major federal operation to arrest him.Investigation indicate that a right-hand man to the chief of the state legislative police warned the criminal personally.

The size of the bribes indicates the seniority of the persons involved.

According to the feds, some of the crooked cops got up to R$ 100,000 in bribes per month to protect the drug gangs. Furthermore, the accused allegedly robbed the criminals they were protecting. The most recent crimes took place in Penha and the Alemão complex, when military and judicial police were caught red-handed looting cash and valuables from residents and drug grangs..

This morning’s operation is being coordinated by the State Secretary of Public Safety, the state unified internal affairs division (CGU) and state prosecutors.At least two judicial police stations have been searched, along with residences all over Rio.

At 7 a.m. or thereabouts, the feds issued a press release on Operation Guilllotine, saying the operation came about after an investigation into  leaks inside another operation being run out of a state police precinct in Macaé, called “Operation .22 Parabellum”,  whose objective was to arrest the drug dealer “Rupinol”, who had operated in Rocinha with Nem.

Sugar | A Coopersucar Is Not Born Every Minute

I have often wondered who the Brazilian “Exxon of biofuel” would turn out to be.

If the development of the sector gets handled the usual Brazilian way — big marketers and risk managers fed by a star alliance of SME producers — there will be a heavyweight champion at the end of this process, I sense.

Many like Cosan, a market-quoted company domiciled offshore, which acquired the entire Esso chain of fueling stations last year, it was, I think.

But I am always more interested in Coopersucar myself.

There is something about Cosan that makes me want to think of it as an Enron of fuel-grade ethanol rather than a Standard Oil. I cannot back up that hunch with reasons, mind you — just a subjective sense of an excess of flash and filigree — so. I study the situation when I have time.

I am planning a full crawl of the biofuel sector today, in fact — after a successful data mining of Big Beef. I am getting good at this.

Anyway, hence two items of interest this morning — first, Cosan quarterly results down 83% on volatile sugar prices and a less than successful harvest.

The second is this note in the Rio-based tipsheet Relaório Reservado — always provocative, at the very least, though it will never be loved by RI directors. I will just gist, not wanting to infringe any copyrights.

Coopersucar — here is its «hot site», an anglicism I have yet to quite grasp the purpose of — is measurably the reining sugar giant of Brazil and has signed a deal with Jamal al-Ghurair to create a joint shipping venture, Copa Shipping Company

This deal “may be just the tip of the iceberg,” according to the tipsheet. 

The Nowhen Bridge to Nowhere | La Tribuna, Santos

Ferryboat, Ilhabela-São Sebastião

A Tribuna files a curmudgeonly editorial on a not atypical Brazilian experience. People will cite the title of the famous paean to Brasil by Stefan Zweig, Brazil: Nation of the Future, and .find all sorts of irony in it

Taking the advice of a virtual colleague, I try to read more of the regional press. Under subsidies put in place by Lula I and II, small and midsize newspapers are going through a fascinating phase. A “glocal” mode of journalism is being introduced to the countless Pasadenas of Brazil — small cities with populations up to 100,000.

The example I like to cite is the lady in the queue with me reading two papers, neither one of them one of the competing metro dailies– the free Destak and Brasil de Fato.

Our editorialist provides us with a very nice lead on the theme of time passing — – “dictators like Pinochet and Saddam have risen, fallen and died” — to dramatize plans for a Santos-Guarujá bridge that have been in the works since 1970.

Since Santos is actually a place I might consider living someday — if it did not frighten me so much — I translate the gist of the editorial complaint and mark it one our personal Sambodian geolocation map.

Note to self: Also add Old Downtown Recife and Ouro Preto.

During all this time, the bridge, which was not a new idea even in 1970, remained as it ever was: a figment of the popular imagination. It would have been the world’s largest bridge in terms of traffic volume,handling 28,000 vehicles a day — not a meaningful world record, to tell the truth, but something..

The record delays have flowed from government inaction, which even in the face of such enormous demand cannot manage a short, dry traffic connection between the two principal cities of the Baixada Santista. Only those who depend on the ferry system to get to work and return home everyday can really tell you how irritating it is to wait sometimes 10 or 20 minutes to board a ferry to take you to the mainland. You will often have to suffer a half-hour delay  upon debarking should one of the ferries conk out, as they often do. Inevitably, it will be raining like the dickens at the time..

And so it was thaat José Serra, 2007-2010, during the PSDB’s 15th year running the richest state in Brazil, announced that it was withdrawing plans for a tunnel (seen as an ideal solution at the time) and relaunching plans for a bridge. Serra had the gall to unveil, with all the pomp and ceremony of a ribbon-cutting,  a tiny scale model of the project, one year later, the 16th of the São Paulo reign. He promised a toll-free crossing, as is currently the case with the ferries.

After revealing plans for the bridge – scheduled to break ground in late 2010 – the governor filed them in the deepest, darkest drawer in the  Bandeirantes Palace, at the beginning of this year, for lack of funding, leaving it up to  Paulo Alexandre Barbosa, a former PSDB state lawmaker who served as head cheerleaderfor the project all these years, and currently serving as state social development secretary, to try to beat out the flames.

Some say the failure to deliver is just the result of another cynical campaign promise, in this case by last year’s presidential campaign. . Others blame the conflict between Serra and his sucessor, current governor  Geraldo Alckmin, who belong to different PSDBs.

Together with  Saulo de Castro Abreu Filho, state secretary of transportation, o Paulo Alexandre of Santos, has tried to smooth over the episode promising a meeting today at which the bridge will be one of the main items on the agenda.We should know soon what fruit those discussions bore.What will be hard to know is is when the suffering of the citizens of Santos and Guaruja, the main victims, will finally be over.  .

.