Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli on Wednesday suspended the payment of BRL 8.5 billion (USD 1.7 billion) in fines under a leniency agreement signed by global construction conglomerate Novonor, formerly known as Odebrecht.
The decision allows Novonor to petition the Federal Prosecution Office and the offices of the Federal Comptroller General and the Solicitor General to review the terms of the leniency agreement it signed in late 2016, in the wake of Operation Car Wash, a years-long anti-corruption task force.
That same year, Odebrecht and its petrochemical subsidiary Braskem pleaded guilty to the U.S. Department of Justice and agreed to pay at least USD 3.5 billion to settle charges with authorities in the U.S., Brazil, and Switzerland, in what was called “the largest foreign bribery case in history.”
This is not the first such move by Justice Toffoli.
In September 2023, he annulled all evidence obtained by police and prosecutors in two computer systems belonging to Odebrecht. He wrote that Car Wash agents “disregarded due process, subverted evidence, and acted with bias and outside of their mandate,” adding that the operation was “one of the greatest judicial errors in the country’s history.”
He based his understanding on leaked messages exchanged by members of the Car Wash task force that showed former judge Sergio Moro was in cahoots with prosecutors.
Wednesday’s decision to suspend the payment of fines is a follow-up to the throwing out of evidence.
In late 2023, Justice Toffoli suspended a BRL 10.3 billion (USD 2.1 billion) fine imposed on meatpacker J&F as part of another leniency agreement, signed in 2017, also under Car Wash. Justice Toffoli’s wife, Roberta Rangel, is a lawyer for the J&F Group, although she did not sign the petition analyzed by her husband.
Justice Toffoli’s recent rulings have prompted the Working Group on Bribery of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to express concern about Brazil’s ability to fight corruption. Transparency International cited the justice’s actions when explaining why Brazil lost ten places in its corruption perception ranking.
Setbacks to the anti-corruption agenda — in particular recent court rulings undoing the work of the highly divisive Operation Car Wash on cases with foreign ramifications — are undermining the authority of the judiciary, Transparency International said.
The report said they “came to affect the country’s international image” and turned Brazil into a “cemetery of evidence.”
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