Antonio Palocci

Early life and career

Palocci was raised in Ribeirão Preto, in the state of São Paulo. His father was an artist and teacher. During his youth as a medical student at the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto Medical School, Palocci took part in several radical movements. He was one of the founders of the Workers' Party and was its president in São Paulo from 1997 to 1998.

After graduation, Palocci worked for five years as a civil servant at the Ribeirão Preto regional office of the São Paulo State Public Health Secretariat. He implemented the Workers’ Health Ward and was the director of the regional office of the public health service.

When Palocci was 28 years old, after occupying positions in various labour unions, including the CUT (linked to the Workers Party) he ran for election as a city councilman (vereador) for the first time. Since then, Palocci has never lost an election. However, he completed only one of his terms (as mayor of Ribeirão Preto, from 1993 to 1996.

Political career

Palocci was elected councilman in Ribeirão Preto in 1988. He did not finish his term but stepped down to for the office of state deputy and won. In 1992, he resigned his term as deputy to become mayor of Ribeirão Preto, after winning the local election. It is during his administrations as mayor that Palocci is alleged to have led a major slush fund operation (see below) for the Workers' Party, a scheme denounced by a former secretary, Rogério Buratti.

In 1995, he received the UNICEF’s Child and Peace prize for his work for the rights of infants and adolescents. In 1996, he received the Juscelino Kubitscheck Award from SEBRAE-SP, the São Paulo chapter of the Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (Brazilian Service for Assistance to Small Businesses), for being the mayor of the city in São Paulo state who offered the best support to small business. In 2002, he received the Mário Covas Award from SEBRAE again for his work on behalf of local small businesses.

Palocci was elected federal deputy in 1998. In 2000, he resigned his office so that he could run again in the mayoral election in Ribeirão Preto. He won the election, and was again mayor of Ribeirão Preto from 2001 to 2002. He resigned in 2002 to work on Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's campaign for the Brazilian presidency. In 2003, when Lula was elected, Palocci officially resigned as the mayor of Ribeirão Preto, was nominated the Finance Minister of Brazil and became a key figure in the new government.

Along with former minister José Dirceu (who resigned and subsequently lost his political rights due to involvement with the Mensalão scandal), Palocci was considered one of the most influential and strong ministers of Lula’s government.

On January 1, 2011, President Dilma Rousseff appointed him as her Chief of Staff.

Mayoral corruption allegations

In 2005, Antonio Palocci was also involved in the Mensalão scandal, after being accused by Rogério Buratti, his former secretary in the Ribeirão Preto municipal government. According to Buratti, between 2001 and 2004, Palocci received a R$50,000 monthly payment from Leão & Leão, a garbage collection company. Investigations are still underway.

Palocci, however, denied this and accused the prosecutors of leaking the preliminary results of an ongoing investigation.

Ministerial abuse of power

A new scandal began to unfold in 2006 after a parliamentary inquiry heard testimony from two witnesses who claimed that the minister had visited a manor house in Brasília suspected of functioning as a hub for fraudulent operations within the government, with the participation of some of his closest aides. Palocci had previously claimed that he had never been at that house. Some Congressmen said at the time that he could face criminal charges for lying to a parliamentary committee.

The main witness in the case was Francenildo Costa, the groundskeeper of the property. He said the minister had visited the house "on at least ten, twenty occasions" and said he could clearly recognize Palocci as the man he had seen in the meetings of senior PT members and governmental officials at the house.

A few days after Costa's deposition, his bank statement (from government-run Caixa Econômica Federal) was suddenly and mysteriously leaked to the press. It seemed to indicate that the groundskeeper had a balance of R$38,860 (about US$18,000.00), which would be incompatible with his income. This was immediately linked by congressmen to his motivations for contradicting the minister, apparently in an attempt to tarnish his credibility as a witness - although, in fact, he had been the second witness to contradict Palocci. The groundskeeper justified the figures by claiming that the money had been deposited by his alleged biological father, a relatively well-off businessman from the state of Piauí, in order to prevent a legal dispute over paternity. The alleged father confirmed he had deposited the money.

With this prompt explanation generally accepted, the focus of attention turned to the fact that the bank statement had been illegally revealed, in breach of Costa's fiscal privacy. The opposition and a great part of the media called the illegal release of Francenildo's bank statement to state-orchestrated harassment. The Federal police began an investigation on the case, which soon spiralled into yet another scandal in the Lula administration: a series of officials and directors at the Caixa Econômica Federal (a state bank) confessed to violating the confidentiality of Costa's account confidentiality following orders from superiors. The chain of command, police found, went up as far as the Ministry of Finance, and the bank's chairman said that he handed the details of the account to Palocci personally. The Minister denied this, but abruptly resigned on March 27, 2006, being immediately replaced by economist Guido Mantega.

On September 26, 2016 Palocci was imprisoned in the city of Sao Paulo by the Federal Police of Brazil as part of the Lava Jato (Car Wash) corruption investigation.