Ex-Brazilian president Lula starts 12 year jail term for accepting seaside apartment as a bribe

FORMER Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has begun a 12 year prison sentence on Friday after a judge ordered him to surrender to the police following his conviction for embezzlement and corruption.

Judge Sergio Moro, the head of Brazil’s huge Car Wash anti-graft probe's ruling, came as a complete surprise given that lawyers had earlier said the leftist former two-term president had at least until Tuesday before he would have to go behind bars. Lula, 72, was once one of the most popular politicians on the planet and he easily leads polls in Brazil’s October presidential election but his incarceration will now throw the race completely open.

On Friday, Judge Moro’s office ruled that in view of President Lula’s stature as a former president, he would have the opportunity to present himself voluntarily to police in the city of Curitiba, where the Car Wash probe is based. Senator Lindbergh Farias, from President Lula’s Workers’ Party, issued a defiant call for supporters to congregate in front of his house in Sao Bernardo near Sao Paulo on Friday.

Lula had petitioned to the Supreme Court on Thursday to be allowed to remain free while pursuing appeals in higher courts against his conviction for receiving a seaside apartment as a bribe from a construction company. However, a lower court appeal failed this January.

Supreme Court judges ruled by six to five in a marathon session that under the law, President Lula must begin his sentence after having lost that first appeal. Still, it had been widely expected that with more technical appeals, President Lula would start his sentence only sometime next week at the earliest.

Brazil’s left is furious at the Supreme Court ruling, seeing President Lula’s imprisonment as a plot to prevent the Workers’ Party from returning to power. Party leader Gleisi Hoffmann, said the court ruling violated constitutional law and the presumption of innocence and made Brazil look like a little banana republic.

However, there were celebrations on the right and among prosecutors supporting the epic Car Wash probe, which has revealed high-level corruption throughout Brazilian business and politics over the last four years. To them, Lula epitomises Brazil’s corruption-riddled elite and his conviction on charges of accepting a seaside apartment as a bribe is Car Wash’s biggest scalp by far.

President Lula, who grew up poor and with little formal education before becoming a trade union leader and politician, says he will go down fighting. Analysts say that his election hopes have now been dealt a body blow but he is not necessarily knocked out.

In theory, once someone has been convicted and lost their lower court appeal, they are barred from running for office under Brazil’s clean slate law but the issue will not be decided for months. President Lula has until mid-August to register his candidacy and only after that will the Superior Electoral Tribunal rule on whether his candidacy is valid or not.