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Brazilian police arrest Cunha's alleged moneyman in anti-corruption operation

Xinhua, July 2, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Brazilian police arrested on Friday a businessman who allegedly served as the moneyman for suspended Lower House speaker Eduardo Cunha.

Lucio Funaro was arrested as part of a new phase of Operation Car Wash, also dubbed Operation Sepsis, which aims to dismantle a corruption scheme at state-run oil giant Petrobras.

Among the allegations to surface was that Cunha kept the largest share, some 80 percent, of the illicit payouts in bribes or kickbacks.

The charges were made by Fabio Cleto, a former executive at Caixa Economica Federal, a state financial institution that would authorize irregular transactions with companies involved in the scheme.

Funaro's was one of 19 arrest warrants issued in Operation Sepsis.

The Petrobras scandal is regularly in the headlines as many former executives of the oil firm, its subsidiaries or other companies involved in the scheme reveal the names and details of the illicit operations as part of plea deals with authorities.

Petrobras recently admitted the corruption scheme bled the company, and state coffers, of at least 2 billion U.S. dollars between 2004 and 2014.

Cunha, under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly squirreling away millions of dollars in undeclared Swiss bank accounts, gained international notoriety as the main proponent of an impeachment drive against Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff.

Rousseff was suspended by legislative vote and is to undergo an impeachment trial this summer.

Cunha, many believe, pursued the impeachment as a means of derailing the corruption investigation and to exact revenge against Rousseff's Workers' Party, which had refused to shield him from the Ethics Committee probe. Endi