A federal court has ruled that the construction company OAS Empreendimentos owns the famous Guarujá triplex and should receive the R$2.4 million (about $436,000) from its sale. The decision, which Judge Marcelo Gentil Monteiro of the 12th Federal Criminal Court of the Federal District issued on Thursday, November 5, was revealed by Folha de S.Paulo on November 10th.
In 2019, after prosecutors refused to allow journalists into an apartment they never proved Lula owned or lived in, the MTST housing movement entered the premises and exposed their lies about “luxury furniture” and a “private elevator.”
Monteiro based his ruling primarily on the fact that the Guarujá Real Estate Registry has always listed OAS as the owner of the property. Former judge Sergio Moro, who was elected governor of Paraná in October, attributed the apartment on the São Paulo coast to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during the Lava Jato investigation (Operation Car Wash). Moro used this false claim to justify Lula’s election year arrest in 2018, opening the door to electoral victory for Jair Bolsonaro, who immediately appointed Moro as his Justice Minister.
This is not the first time a judge has ruled that OAS is the owner of the triplex. In 2018, Judge Luciana Corrêa Tôrres de Oliveira of the 2nd Court of Execution and Titles of the Federal District broke with the Lava Jato investigation. She ruled that the apartment in the Solaris Building at Astúrias Beach in Guarujá belonged to OAS Empreendimentos, as the property registry showed. Last Thursday’s decision upholds her ruling.
With the case now close to an end, OAS can withdraw the estimated R$2.4 million (about $436,000) from the sale. The money has been held in a court account for years at the state mortgage bank, Caixa Econômica Federal.
Monteiro’s decision also resolves a pending matter for Lula’s late wife, Marisa Letícia, who died in 2017. In 2005, she joined the Housing Cooperative of Bank Workers of São Paulo (Bancoop) and began paying installments on an 82 square meter apartment in the building that contains the triplex. When the cooperative went into bankruptcy, OAS Empreendimentos took over the construction project and Marisa Letícia gave up on the purchase. A court ordered in 2021 that her investment be returned to her estate.
Investigators used her link to the building to open the investigation that led to Lula’s arrest. Lula’s lawyers said throughout the investigation, that he visited the apartment once in 2014, to evaluate a possible purchase, and decided against it.
Without ever providing any material evidence, Judge Moro said that Lula, who hadn’t held public office for 4 years at the time, received the property as alleged payment for construction services OAS provided to the federal government. The federal prosecutors suspected that apartment owners in the building had used third parties’ names to hide assets. They reached that conclusion after obtaining the property records from the city’s registry office. In their view, the records insinuated involvement of the former president, which could constitute money laundering, although they were unable to provide any material evidence to back up their claims.
Bancoop, the original builder, folded and passed the Solaris Building project to OAS in 2009. João Vaccari Neto, a former Workers’ Party treasurer, was a director in the cooperative between 2005 and 2010. A court initially convicted him of corruption in 2015, but he was acquitted in 2017 due to lack of evidence.
Lula’s lawyers provided a vast body of evidence during the trial showing that he never received any favor from OAS, much less owned the property, which was vacant at the time of the trial. Despite the lack of evidence, Moro, who went on to become a far right politician and has just been elected as Governor of Parana, originally sentenced Lula to twelve years in prison.
Lula surrendered in April 2018 and was jailed in Curitiba, and protesters responded by creating the Free Lula movement (Movimento Lula Livre). They set up a camp outside the Federal Police Superintendency in the Paraná capital, where Lula was held. Shortly after Lula’s arrest, members of the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) occupied the notorious triplex apartment and live streamed video proving claims the prosecutors had made about it being filled with luxury furniture were false, that no elevator had been installed and that it was vacant aside from a cheap, old butane tank stove.
Lula was released from prison in 2019 after the Supreme Court ruled his case had been illegally forum shopped from the state of the alleged crime to a jurisdiction with a sympathetic judge in a neighboring state. In 2021, his conviction was annulled. That same year, the Federal Prosecutors’ Office (MPF) closed the triplex case, ending all proceedings against Lula. The request followed another Supreme Federal Court (STF) ruling that found Moro biased in the case.
This article first ran in Sul 21, was translated and edited for context by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.