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Brazil: corruption brings down second top official


Sao Paulo / AFP
07/08/2005

Brazil's ruling Workers Party on Tuesday lost a second top official to a corruption scandal in as many days, when the treasury chief offered to step aside until the completion of a congressional probe into alleged misdeeds.

Treasury chief Delubio Soares said in a letter he would renounce his post until the end of the probe, the leftist Workers Party (PT) confirmed.

The decision was announced before a PT emergency meeting and after Monday's announcement that the party's secretary general, Silvio Pereira, was stepping aside until the end of the investigation.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's party has been accused of paying deputies to secure their support in Congress. Lula's cabinet chief, Jose Dirceu, who was the architect of Lula's presidential victory in 2002, resigned last month due to the corruption scandal. He has denied committing any wrongdoing.

The PT's leaders have come under intense pressure to resign since published reports over the weekend linked Soares and party president Jose Genoino to an advertising executive accused in the vote-buying scandal.

The report said Soares and Genoino were signatories in a one-million-dollar loan request by the PT, dated February 2003, that was co-signed by the advertising executive, Marcos Valerio, as a guarantor.

Valerio has been accused of being an intermediary in the vote-buying scandal. Meanwhile, the party's mobilization secretary, Francisco Campos, warned that the PT was confronted with the "biggest crisis in its 25 year history."