Brazil A Saudi jewelry scandal complicates the return of Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil

Jair Bolsonaro is still unclear when he will return to Brazil, but he does know that returning home will not be easy: a million-dollar jewelry scandal that the Saudi Arabian government gave to his wife threatens to ruin his image even among his supporters

Brazil A Saudi jewelry scandal complicates the return of Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil

Jair Bolsonaro is still unclear when he will return to Brazil, but he does know that returning home will not be easy: a million-dollar jewelry scandal that the Saudi Arabian government gave to his wife threatens to ruin his image even among his supporters .

The case has Brazil in suspense, because it resembles a serial soap opera. First it was learned that on December 29, 2022, one day before leaving Brazil so as not to hand over the presidential sash to his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro sent his Minister of Mines and Energy, Bento Albuquerque, to try to recover the jewelry confiscated at Customs.

But the case revealed by O Estado de Sao Paulo continued to grow: Bolsonaro sent senior officials and the military on at least three other occasions to look for the jewels valued at 3.2 million dollars. It was not successful.

"If the shamelessness and the use of the State apparatus for private gain by the Bolsonaro family is incredible, the resistance of the public service is also incredible. At the top, Bolsonaro sometimes succeeded, but the bureaucratic machinery resisted and said ' no' to the then President of the Republic", wrote the analyst Miriam Leitao in O Globo.

Another second package of jewelry given to Michelle Bolsonaro by the Saudis evaded customs control, but the Lula government, which has been slowly revealing lurid details of Bolsonaro's management, made that gift also known.

On December 30, 2022, Bolsonaro, still president, boarded a Brazilian Air Force (FAB) plane that dropped him off in Orlando, United States, where he still remains. His intention, everything seems to indicate, was to take the jewels with him to the United States.

Thus, O Estado revealed on Sunday that on December 29 of that year "a FAB plane with the first sergeant of the Navy Jairo Moreira da Silva" landed at the Guarulhos airport, in Sao Paulo, to search for the jewels and received "a resounding no from the Treasury official Marco Antônio Lopes Santanna".

The sergeant asked to speak to a superior and received another "no." Bolsonaro flew to the United States without the jewels given to him by the Saudi regime, jewels that were not part of the presidential patrimony: if they had been declared as a gift to the president and his wife, he would not have been able to dispose of them once his government ended.

The jewels had been confiscated upon returning from a visit by Bolsonaro to Riyadh in 2021. An assistant to Minister Albuquerque carried them in a backpack, without declaring. The inspectors retained at customs a pair of earrings, a ring, a necklace and a watch, made with precious stones, as well as an ornament in the shape of a horse with golden ornaments.

Michelle, Bolsonaro's wife, assured on her social networks that she had no idea about the matter and felt like the "cheated wife" and the "last to know." She added that she put her lawyers to work on the issue.

Amid the scandal of the jewels, the return of the former president to Brazil still does not have a specific date. Flavio, one of his sons. announced this Tuesday that the right-wing leader would return on the 15th of this month, but apologized 15 minutes later for having offered unconfirmed information.

Justice is investigating Bolsonaro's role in the invasion of a crowd of extremists on January 8 in the Plaza of the Three Powers in Brasilia, an event with which the former president claims to have had nothing to do. Thousands of people entered the Planalto Palace, seat of the Government, the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and Congress that Sunday and destroyed its facilities.

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