Casino are being dragged into Lava Jato

All,

Skeletons falling out of the closets in LatAm. Potentially explosive material in the Exito/GPA reshuffle.

It emerged over the weekend that Casino allegedly paid E30m to then president Lula to thwart a manoeuvre by Abiliu Diniz (Carrefour board member) that would have diluted Casino’s holding in GPA - according to under pressure Antonio Palocci, former Chief of Staff of Dilma Rousseff. The money would have allegedly been paid to a Swiss bank account and used: $2m to fund election campaign of Haddad, R$10m of Rousseff and much of the remainder for the wonderfully named "Lula-Palocci Institute", from which he made frequent withdrawals.

Diniz is hardly the victim as he himself had the Chief of Staff on pay-roll via a consultancy contract and was looking for a cheap loan from the country’s state development bank BNDES, which Lula consequently moved to prevent.

According to Palocci, Nauri may have even been directly involved and the agreement led to Casino taking control of GPA.

Couldn’t make it up…

Wolfgang