During his visit to Argentina this week, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was accompanied by a notorious PT member accused of taking a luxury apartment in Miami from a lobbyist in Operation Lava Jato.
Former President of the Chamber, Federal Assemblyman from Rio Grande do Sul Marco Maia traveled to Buenos Aires at the Chamber’s expense and joined the group accompanying the President. He even stayed at the same hotel as Lula.
In the column, Maia’s office said he attended the trip as a member of the president’s entourage, and the deputy then said he was invited by Lula himself.
“It was a tribute to me from President Lula because I was President of the Chamber of Deputies and I have now resumed a mandate,” he said.
However, the Presidency of the Republic denied that Maia was officially among the members of the entourage. When asked about the condition in which he attended official events in the Argentine capital, he stopped responding.
View of the Point from the South Tower in Miami: Condominium even has a dock for boats
Marco Maia’s name surfaced in investigations into discrepancies in the Planning Department during Dilma Rousseff’s administration. In an awardwinning denunciation, lobbyist Alexandre Romano, accused of operating the Propinoduct, said a Miami apartment purchased and registered in the name of one of his companies had Maia as the true owner Romano, known as “Chambinho”. , so would be a kind of luxury “orange” of the MP, who at the time denied owning the property.
Before the denunciation, the investigation had gathered evidence that Maia was a frequent visitor to the apartment. The 164 square meter property in a luxury gated community on the outskirts of Miami was purchased for US$671,000 more than R$3.4 million in current value. “That was an empty accusation,” the deputy now defends himself. He says the investigation was unsuccessful.
Marco Maia returned to the chamber for a blitz season that lasted just a month. As deputy, he took over earlier this year from Paulo Pimenta, who was appointed Minister of Lula’s Communications Secretariat.