Sergio Moro

Sergio Fernando Moro (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈsɛʁʒju ˈmoɾu]; born 1 August 1972) is a Brazilian jurist, former federal judge, college professor, and politician. He was elected as a member of the Federal Senate for Paraná in October 2022. In 2015, he gained national attention as one of the lead judges in Operation Car Wash (Portuguese: Operação Lava Jato), a criminal investigation into a high-profile corruption and bribery scandal involving government officials and business executives. Moro was also Minister of Justice and Public Security under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro from 2019 to 2020.

On 29 October, shortly after the 2018 Brazilian general election, President-elect Bolsonaro nominated Moro to be Minister of Justice and Public Security. On 1 November, Moro accepted the job after personally meeting with Bolsonaro. His appointment to Bolsonaro's cabinet and the way he had previously conducted Operation Car Wash (in particular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's case) drew praise from his peers and a significant portion of the Brazilian society. However, it also faced significant criticism, especially after allegations of partiality and judicial misconduct on his part were published by the American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, during the Car Wash investigations. Moro left the government in April 2020, mentioning the President's undue interference in the affairs of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. Then in 2020 he worked with the firm Alvarez and Marsal for almost one year.

Since his retirement from public service, leaked messages exchanged between then-judge Moro and Brazilian prosecutors resulted in widespread questioning of his impartiality during the Operation Car Wash hearings; Moro has publicly disputed these allegations. On March 9, 2021, the habeas corpus trial was resumed in the Supreme Federal Court that questioned his impartiality, with two judges, Gilmar Mendes and Ricardo Lewandowski, voting that Moro was indeed biased, including the vote of these two last for the payment of a US$40,000 fine and the court costs of the lawsuit filed against Lula. Later, in 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Committee agreed with the STF that Sergio Moro was biased in all cases against Lula.

Early life and education

Moro was born in Maringá, son of Odete Starke Moro and Dalton Áureo Moro, a former professor of geography at the State University of Maringá, who died in 2005. His elder sibling, César Fernando Moro, owns a technology company. His family is of Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Polish descent. His Italian forebears were from Veneto: his great grandparents came from Breganze and Sandrigo in the Province of Vicenza. Moro's family moved to Ponta Grossa when Sergio and César were children.

Moro got a law degree from State University of Maringá in 1995. During his studies, he interned in a law firm for two years, being described as a "sensational person" by the lawyer who hired him. He attended a summer course at Harvard Law School in 1998, including studies on money laundering promoted by the US Department of State. He received his master's degree in 2000 from the Federal University of Paraná with the dissertation "Development and Judicial Enforcement of Constitutional Norms", guided by Professor Clèmerson Merlin Clève. In 2002, he completed a PhD in State Law at the same institution with the thesis "Constitutional Jurisdiction as Democracy", guided by Marçal Justen Filho. In 2007, he participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program in which he visited U.S. agencies and institutions responsible for preventing and combating money laundering.

Career

In 1996, Moro started teaching law graduates at his alma mater, the Federal University of Paraná. This very same year, he became a federal judge in Porto Alegre, before moving to Joinville, Santa Catarina, in 1999. Between 2003 and 2007, Moro worked on a case involving the public bank Banestado. The investigation resulted in the arrest of nearly 200 people for tax evasion and money laundering.

In 2012, he worked with Rosa Weber, a minister of the Brazilian Supreme Court, in the Mensalão scandal. Weber called him because of his experience with cases involving financial crimes, more specifically money laundering. After leaving the judiciary and the Bolsonaro government, his first case as a lawyer, in 2020, favored controversial Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz, in a dispute against mining company Vale S.A. In the same year, Moro was hired as a partner by the consultancy Alvarez & Marsal, judicial administrator of the recovery process of the Odebrecht Group – the company targeted by then judge Moro during Lava Jato. Moro worked for Alvarez & Marsal for almost one year and was paid approximately half million dollars.

Operation Car Wash

In 2014, while working in Curitiba, Sergio Moro became one of the head judges in Operation Car Wash (Portuguese: Operação Lava Jato), a massive criminal investigation that started as a money laundering case and evolved to a huge corruption scandal crackdown, involving bribery and misappropriation of public funds by political authorities. The investigation was modeled after Mani pulite in Italy. Corruption scandals in Brazil usually take a long time to be investigated and the legal processes tend to stagnate. However, at an unusual speed, Moro authorized further investigations, detentions and interrogations of suspects. By late 2017, at least 120 sentences were carried and 175 people were sent to jail. Despite some criticism from fellow jurists for being a "media darling", Moro enjoyed high popularity with the Brazilian people and became one of the main faces in the fight against corruption in the country.

Despite criticisms regarding the high speed with which he imposed sentences in such a complex case, his actions were backed by the Brazilian Supreme Court and most of his sentences and decisions were upheld in higher courts. By late 2016, Moro had sent 28 people to jail on charges of corruption, with four of them having their sentences reduced and another four being acquitted by higher courts. Overall, in Operation Car Wash, 71% of the sentences given by Moro were upheld by the Brazilian Regional Federal Courts. However, in 2021, due to Moro's conviction for partiality, famous Lava Jato defendants reaped the fruits of the decisions of the Federal Supreme Court that relaxed the jurisprudence that had taken politicians, businessmen and bribery operators to jail. The number of whistleblower petitions, initial investigations, inquiry requests, etc. dropped from 257 to 200. Of the 31 inquiries, 3 were filed in 2021, 7 complaints await judgment (the same number as in 2020) and no convictions.

In 2017, Moro sentenced former Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to 9 and a half years in jail, on the charges of money laundering and passive corruption. Lula was considered the frontrunner for the 2018 presidential election. The sentencing caused an uproar in Brazil at that time, with many widely supporting and saluting the judge for his decision, with others claiming he was getting ahead of himself. The decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court of Brazil in 2021, which stated that Moro had acted with partiality. The April 2022 decision of Lula's 2016 petition was ratified and expanded by the UN human rights committee. Additionally, in a unanimous decision in April, the Regional Federal Court (TRF) ruled that Lula's lawyers be compensated for the telephone interception and illegal secrecy lifting determined by Moro in 2016

Minister of Justice

In many of his encounters with the media and further interviews, Sergio Moro described himself as "apolitical" and said he had no interested in joining the political world. However, right after the 2018 elections, rumors started to circulate that the president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, was considering nominating Moro to head the Ministry of Justice. Despite claiming he was unaware of such a plan, it was later revealed that Moro was contacted by Paulo Guedes, an incoming member of Bolsonaro's administration, during Bolsonaro's election campaign. Exactly four days after the election, on 1 November 2018, Moro met with Bolsonaro and it was announced that he would become a minister in Bolsonaro's administration.

His nomination was well received by fellow magistrates across the country, but opponents of Bolsonaro and some people in the press criticized the decision on the grounds of conflict of interest, claiming that Moro's sentencing of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva greatly benefited Bolsonaro's bid for the presidency.

On 12 May 2019, president Bolsonaro publicly expressed the intention of nominating Moro to the Supreme Federal Court, replacing Justice Celso de Mello, who would retire in 2020. However, on 1 October 2020, he nominated Kassio Nunes Marques.