Brazilian prosecutors have announced a probe into possible influence peddling by former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on behalf of scandal-ridden construction giant Odebrecht.
The investigation will center on Lula's alleged use of clout after leaving office to help Odebrecht land billion-dollar deals in Latin America and Africa.
"There is an investigation into possible influence peddling by ex-president Lula with the leaders of other countries on behalf of the construction company Odebrecht," a spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office in the capital Brasilia said yesterday.
The investigation, which drags the once highly popular Lula into Brazil's ever-widening corruption crisis, was launched July 8, but only revealed yesterday.
Lula's foundation immediately issued a statement saying he had nothing to fear.
"We are calm. The Lula Institute is certain of the transparency and legality of ex-president Lula's activities," spokesman Jose Chrispiniano said.
Prosecutors announced in May that they were considering the probe.
According to the prosecutor's office, the alleged influence peddling took place between 2011 and 2014, after Lula left office and was replaced by his hand-picked Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff.
As an ex-president, Lula retained his status as a major world figure and the face of commodity-rich Brazil's rise to economic power.
He is also alleged to have helped persuade the Brazilian state-owned development bank BNDES to finance the foreign projects.
Brazil's political and elite business circles have already been thrown into commotion by a growing probe into a bribes-and-kickbacks network that saw companies including Odebrecht bribing politically connected executives at state oil giant Petrobras to grant inflated contracts.
Some of the money allegedly went into the Workers' Party campaign coffers.
Rousseff, chairwoman of Petrobras for seven years, has not been directly implicated in the scandal but there are mounting calls for her resignation or impeachment.
A report in Epoca magazine in May said that Brazil's biggest construction company had paid Lula to use his influence on its behalf in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ghana and Venezuela.
But Odebrecht, which does everything from building airports to deep water oil drilling and mining, has said there was nothing untoward in the powerful ex-president's involvement as a booster for Brazilian business.
