Chapter 28Brazil
On April 7, 2018, the 35th president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was the nation's first former president ever to be jailed, for charges stemming from Brazil's Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) corruption investigation. Lula's incarceration followed after police in Rio de Janeiro uncovered a first‐of‐its kind Bitcoin‐based money laundering scheme in which state officials misstated the budget spent on food for state‐run prisons to the tune of $22.4 million. Luíz Henrique Casemiro, superintendent of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in Rio, said, “This was the first‐time cryptocurrencies were used in such an operation to fly below the radar of the Central Bank and the IRS.”
Operation Car Wash began as an investigation into money laundering in 2014, but quickly turned into something much greater, uncovering a vast intricate web of political and corporate racketeering involving the heads of states of Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama. It is the biggest corruption scandal in global history that exposed a culture of systemic graft in Brazilian politics and provoked a backlash from the establishment fierce enough to bring down the government of the 36th president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, and leave the administration of the 37th president, Michel Temer, on the brink of collapse.1
Blockchain Adoption: Blockchain adoption is widespread in govtech, fintech, and renewable energy applications.
To bring ...
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