Eduardo Cunha

Personal life

Born in Rio de Janeiro on 29 September 1958, Eduardo Cunha is the son of Elcy Teixeira da Cunha and Elza Cosentino. As his mother descended from Italian immigrants from the town of Castelluccio Inferiore in the region of Basilicata, he also holds Italian citizenship. When he was 14 years old, he began working part-time as an insurance broker. Later, he worked as an auditor at the firm Arthur Andersen, from 1978 to 1980. He majored in economics at the Universidade Candido Mendes, and served as an economist at Xerox of Brazil, between 1980 and 1982.

Cunha has four children. He is currently married to journalist Cláudia Cruz.

Political views

Eduardo Cunha is a conservative Evangelical Christian. He seeks to ban abortion, increase marijuana penalties, and further restrict homosexual activity. As an evangelist, Cunha has proposed legislation titled The Law of Heterophobia (in response to the Law of Homophobia). The law demands a prison sentence of one to three years for anyone who forbids entry to a heterosexual to any public or private property, levies special rates at hotels or restricts the public display of affection.

Elections with PDS and PMDB

His first contact with politics was working on the campaigns of Eliseu Resende, a candidate for state government with the Social Democratic Party (PDS) in the 1982 election, and Moreira Franco, a PMDB candidate for Rio de Janeiro government, in the 1986 election. When Anthony Garotinho was elected Governor of Rio de Janeiro in 1999, he appointed Francisco Silva as Secretary of Housing with Cunha as his deputy. However, Cunha was in office for just over six months, where he was forced to resign due to allegations of irregularities in no-bid contracts and favoring shell companies. Then in 2001, the State Audit Court confirmed that there were indeed various irregularities in the bids of these shell companies, including the adulteration of the clearance certificate from state taxes.

State Representative (2001-2002)

With Garotinho's support, in 2001 Cunha assumed a vacant state representative's seat in ALERJ, the state assembly of Rio de Janeiro, which guaranteed him immunity against the public prosecutor's investigations. He was then elected with 101,495 votes in the follow-up campaign.

Federal Representative (2003-2016)

Cunha joined the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies on 1 February 2003, representing Rio de Janeiro. He was elected in the 2006 elections to the House with 130,773 votes. He was re-elected in 2010 through the PMDB with 150,616 votes. To the TSE (Brazilian Election Commission), Cunha reported receiving R$4.76 million in donations for the 2010 campaign, of which R$500,000 came from the construction company Camargo Corrêa.

In 2013, Cunha was elected leader of the PMDB in the House. The following year, a criminal he filed a complaint with the Supreme Federal Court against now-Congressman Garotinho (PR-RJ) for libel and defamation. On his blog Garotinho had referred to Cunha as a "deputy lobbyist". House aides and lobbyists with access to PMDB parliamentarians reported that Eduardo Cunha recorded on an agenda a list of companies - mainly linked to energy, telecommunications and construction - who benefited from parliamentary action. Still, later that year, he was re-elected for another term, obtaining 232,708 votes (the third most votes received in the State of Rio de Janeiro).

Cunha was indicted in Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato), the scandal involving state-owned oil company Petrobras. Prosecutors say that he "took as much as US$40 million in bribes for himself and his allies, plundering Petrobras, the government-controlled oil company, while laundering money through an evangelical megachurch." For these charges, prosecutors requested "a potential sentence of 184 years in prison if the Supreme Court puts him on trial and convicts him." During this period, Cunha led the movement to impeach President Dilma Rousseff on charges relating to manipulating figures reported in government accounts. He was suspended from duty as speaker of the lower house by Brazil's supreme court on 5 May 2016, because of allegations of attempting to intimidate members of congress, and obstructing the ongoing Car Wash investigation into his alleged bribe-taking. In September 2016 the lower house voted with a large majority to strip Cunha of his seat in the lower house and to ban him from politics for eight years.

Arrest, Sentencing, and Pending Litigation (2016-Present)

Cunha was arrested on 19 October 2016 in Brasília and sent to the Complexo Médico Penal de Pinhais, a prison in the Curitiba metropolitan area, to await trial. Ordering preventive detention, federal judge Sérgio Moro cited risks to "public order, as well as a concrete possibility of flight given his access to hidden resources abroad", and also his dual nationality. On 30 March 2017, he found him guilty of corruption, tax evasion, and money laundering related to the Car Wash scheme, and sentenced him to 15 years and 4 months in prison. A federal court decided 18 July 2017 that Cunha should remain in jail in connection with separate bribery charges related to Fund for the Guarantee of the Time of Service (FI-FGTS), linked to Caixa Econômica Federal Federal.

Cunha has two additional criminal charges. One pertains to his alleged involvement in Operation Sépis and the other, to accusations he received $5 million in bribes from ship construction contracts at Petrobrás. In addition, Cunha is the respondent in civil proceedings over alleged "illicit advantages" he gave favored contractors in Petrobrás contract bidding. Cunha had previously faced charges of living rent-free in an apartment owned by a money-dealer, embezzlement and laundering money through his megachurch. In May 2017, according to recordings obtained by O Globo, Brazilian President Michel Temer instructed Joesley Batista of the meatpacking conglomerate JBS to continue making payoffs to Cunha. Batista allegedly recorded the conversation as part of a plea bargain. As of July 2017, the Brazilian justice system still had not identified the owners of eleven offshore accounts that together received $4 million US from José Henriques in connection with the purchase of an oilfield in Benin. Henrique made payments to a total of 15 accounts, including Cunha's Orion SP.

Cunha had previously been accused by Marcio Faria da Silva, a former vice president of Odebrecht, in testimony he proffered for a plea bargain in his own criminal case, of negotiating a $40 million US campaign donation to the PMDB. He denies doing this. The PMDB government of Rio de Janeiro, described as "ideologically malleable", reportedly demanded enormous kickbacks, roughly 5% of the total cost of the construction projects that were part of the Olympics, and the work performed for the inflated costs involved was notoriously shabby.