Brazil's Lula challenges prosecutors to find evidence against him

Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made on Thursday an emotional speech challenging the prosecutors who denounced him for corruption and money laundering to find any evidence against him.

On Wednesday, prosecutors accused Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2010, of leading a vast corruption ring at Brazilian oil company Petrobras.

In response, Lula said there is no concrete evidence against him in the document and challenged the prosecutors to find evidence that he indeed committed corruption crimes.

"Prove one act of corruption of mine and I will go to prison by myself, on foot," he said.

He also criticized the fact that, at one moment, prosecutors said they "had conviction" Lula is the mastermind of a large corruption scheme at Petrobras, but at another moment they said they did not have "definitive evidence" of Lula's involvement.

"How do they summon a press conference in a hotel, spend government money for that, to present the proof of a crime, but by the end say 'we have no proof, but we have conviction'?" he said.

"I have a clear conscience. I know where I came from, where I go, who helped me, who wants me to go away and who wants me to return," he added.

Calling the charges "judicial persecution", Lula dismissed them as an attempt to end his political career.

"As we were starting to have success in the presidency, they are trying to do with us what they did with Dilma (Rousseff, the former president impeached in August). A part of the press and a part of the judiciary already tried to oust me from the presidency in 2005," argued Lula.

"What sparked this anger was the success of our government, the best policy of social inclusion, the best policy of educational inclusion in this country," he added.

Lula did not deny or confirm definitely his intentions to run for president again in 2018. Though Lula has a strong rejection rate, he would be the most likely candidate to win 2018 presidential elections, according to a new poll in 2016 released on Friday by the Vox Populi Institute.

According to the charge sheet, the former president owns an apartment in the coastal city of Guaruja, near Sao Paulo, which was renovated for free by OAS, a construction company involved in the corruption ring. It also alleges that Lula owns an undeclared property in Atibaia, a municipality in the state of Sao Paulo.

Investigators estimate Lula received benefits worth 3.7 million reais (about 1.1 million U.S. dollars) from OAS in total.

Lula's wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva, president of the Lula Institute Paulo Okamotto, and five OAS executives were also accused.

The former president also complained his family had not been treated with respect.

"They entered into the house of my son, who has never participated in politics, as if he was a bandit," he explained.

On Thursday, a Brazilian court condemned a close friend of Lula, businessman Jose Carlos Bumlai, to nine years and ten months in prison for his role in the Petrobras corruption ring.

Joao Vaccari Neto, the former treasurer of the Workers' Party, was jailed for six years and eight months for passive corruption as part of the same sentencing. Endi