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Roundup: Rousseff hails supreme court's ruling against phone taps of ex-president

Xinhua, March 24, 2016 Adjust font size:

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on

Wednesday hailed Supreme Court Judge Teori Zavascki's ruling that a lower court judge should not have publicly released tapped phone conversations of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Rousseff's predecessor.

"The decision by Teori is important as it establishes the primacy of the law in relation to the institutions investigating President Lula," Rousseff told reporters.

On Tuesday night, Zavascki asked Judge Sergio Moro, the judge in charge of the corruption investigation into Petrobras, a state-owned oil company, to send the Supreme Court all documents related to Lula, including those related to the tapped phone conversations.

Zavascki said that there was no reason for Moro to publicly release the conversations, especially when some of them had no link to the investigation.

Rousseff appointed Lula as her chief of staff last week, a move seen by some to shield her predecessor from his alleged involvement in the Petrobras case as a cabinet member can only be tried before the Supreme Court in Brazil.

However, Supreme Court Judge Gilmar Mendes issued a preliminary injunction on Saturday to suspend Lula's post and returned the corruption case against him to Moro.

Moro then released some tapped phone conversations between Lula and many politicians, including Rousseff, who once held a seat on Petrobras' board of directors.

However, Moro's investigation did dig up something new despite the setback.

In February, payroll documents were seized in a police raid on the offices of Odebrecht, one of the companies ensnared in the Petrobras scandal. The documents were made public on Wednesday and suggest that the construction company made payments to roughly 200 politicians from 18 different parties during the municipal elections in 2012 and the general elections in 2014.

Police said the documents bear the initials of Marcelo Odebrecht, the company's former president who was jailed for over 19 years on money laundering and corruption charges in early March.

The raid on Odebrecht was part of Operation Lava Jato, an ongoing investigation into the Petrobras case, police said.

Leading politicians involved in the Odebrecht case include President of the Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha and President of the Senate Renan Calheiros. Endi