The Brazilian newspaper O Globo revealed on Wednesday that prosecutors in the country are pursuing charges of money laundering and fraud against 25-year-old Jair Renan Bolsonaro, the youngest son of the nation’s eponymous ex-president.
An attorney for the younger Bolsonaro appeared to confirm the charges in remarks to the Globo-affiliated G1 news outlet, objecting that the improper leaking of the details of the case to the media was “very detrimental to the defense, due process, the presumption of innocence and, thus, the image of those who have the right to defend themselves.”
The Brazilian newspaper Estadao independently confirmed the criminal case. The reports indicated that prosecutors submitted their paperwork to charge Jair Renan Bolsonaro on March 15, leaving the federal courts to process the case.
The news of the charges against Bolsonaro’s youngest son surfaced a day after Bolsonaro himself was indicted on charges of conspiracy and inserting false data into government public health systems. Prosecutors accused Bolsonaro and 16 others of being part of a conspiracy to grant him and his 12-year-old daughter Laura false coronavirus vaccination cards in late 2022, which would have allowed the two to enter the United States. Bolsonaro, Laura, and his wife Michelle Bolsonaro traveled to Florida shortly after his defeat in the 2022 presidential election to convicted felon Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president.
Bolsonaro faces several other criminal cases including allegations that he plotted a “coup” against Lula and that he played a role in the January 8, 2023, riot in Brasilia against Lula’s inauguration for a third term. Opponents of the inauguration argued that, as a convicted felon, Lula should never have been allowed to run for president. Lula was allowed on the ballot after the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), the nation’s highest court, overturned his multiple convictions on procedural grounds, failing to present any exonerating evidence.
File/Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (R) gestures next to his son Jair Renan Bolsonaro, during the launch of his new party, the Alliance for Brazil, at a hotel in Brasilia on November 21, 2019. ( EVARISTO SA/AFP via Getty Images)
According to O Globo, the charges against Jair Renan Bolsonaro stem from his event planning business, RB Eventos E Mídia. Prosecutors are alleging that the younger Bolsonaro artificially inflated his company’s revenue, falsely claiming that it made 4.6 million Brazilian reais (about $923,000) in one year.
The falsified profits allowed his company to secure three bank loans fraudulently, according to prosecutors. The case also accused Jair Renan Bolsonaro of fabricating “ghost” people and companies with whom his enterprise allegedly did business, including a person named “Antonio Amancio Alves Mandarrari,” the owner of the “ghost” company Mandarrari Aesthetics Clinic. Neither Alves Mandarrari nor the company, prosecutors say, exist.
In contrast to Jair Bolsonaro’s older sons, who have pursued careers in public office, Jair Renan has largely kept out of politics. He notably made headlines in May 2020 after the video game streaming platform Twitch banned him for telling fellow players not to support Wuhan coronavirus lockdown measures.
Former President Bolsonaro was loudly opposed to locking down businesses and schools during the early days of the pandemic, and went on later to publicly oppose the novel vaccination products debuting to contain the spread of the disease. His indictment surfacing on Tuesday is tied to such coronavirus protocol, as prosecutors are charging him with having his aides issue him and daughter Laura documentation claiming that both had ingested coronavirus vaccine products when they had not. The elder Bolsonaro did not immediately comment on the charges this week, but denied ever claiming to consume a vaccination product in comments in May following police raids against his former aides in pursuit of evidence on the case.
“I have never been asked for a vaccination card anywhere; there is no tampering on my part,” Bolsonaro told reporters at the time. “There isn’t. I didn’t take the vaccine and that’s it. I never denied that. Some people pressured me to take the vaccine. Yes, natural. I decided not to take it because I read the Pfizer “’leaflet.'”
“My wife’s vaccine card was also photographed, she took the vaccine in the United States, from Janssen [Johnson & Johnson]. And the other, my daughter, Laura, 12 years old, didn’t take the vaccine either. She has a medical report regarding that,” Bolsonaro asserted.
File/Jair Renan Bolsonaro, son of President Bolsonaro attends a protest in support of gun rights and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in Brasilia, Brazil, July 9, 2022. (Mateus Bonomi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The administration of leftist President Joe Biden was still enforcing a ban on foreign nations from entering the United States without proof that they had consumed a coronavirus vaccination product at the time of Bolsonaro’s visit in late 2022. The ban made international headlines when it prevented the world’s top men’s tennis player at the time, Novak Djokovic, from participating in several of the world’s most prestigious tournaments hosted in America.
Jair Bolsonaro is facing up to 12 years in prison in the vaccine card case. The Lula administration has also banned him from holding public office until 2030, launched multiple police raids against the former president and his allies, and seized his passport to prevent him from leaving the country.
“Brazil, unfortunately, is not a democracy anymore,” Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of Jair Bolsonaro’s sons and a member of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, told Congress during a hearing this month.
“I have always warned in my speeches in [Brazil’s] Congress about dangers of my country turning into a Cuba or Venezuela with their concentration camps,” Eduardo Bolsonaro said. “Today, unfortunately, I live in my own movie about the gulag. My father is now persecuted and slandered in the various ways, and as in any tyranny, the limit of the ridiculous no longer exists.”
Another Brazilian lawmaker present at the hearing, Gustavo Gayer, observed that “many other congressmen are not here today because they have had their passports seized.”
“We no longer have the privilege of saying the truth, saying what we think, giving our opinion,” Gayer told his American counterparts. “All these institutions that are valuable for democracy have been kidnapped and are served as an instrument of oppression. They are served only as to arrest and oppress people for their opinions.”
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
