(FILES) Brazilian former President (1990-1992) Fernando Collor de Mello delivers a speech during the debate on suspending and impeaching President Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia on May 11, 2016. A Brazilian supreme court judge ordered on April 24, 2025 the imprisonment of former president Fernando Collor de Mello, sentenced in 2023 to eight years and ten months in prison for corruption in an investigation derived from the Lava Jato mega-case. (Photo by EVARISTO SA / AFP)
April 25, 2025
Brasília, Brazil (AFP)—Brazil’s former president Fernando Collor de Mello was arrested and taken to prison Friday to begin serving a nearly nine-year sentence for corruption and money laundering, the latest former leader to face jail time.
Collor de Mello, Brazil’s first democratically elected president after a decades-long dictatorship, resigned in 1992 after Congress launched impeachment proceedings against him for allegedly taking bribes.
His arrest stems from a conviction over bribes taken two decades later while a senator, part of the sprawling “Car Wash” corruption scandal.
The 75-year-old was detained in Maceio city in northeastern Alagoas state, where he served as a senator and governor, a federal police source told AFP.
In 2023, Collor de Mello was found guilty of having received 20 million reais ($3.5 million dollars) in bribes while a senator between 2010 and 2014 to “irregularly facilitate contracts” between a construction company and a former subsidiary of Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras.
On Thursday, Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes rejected Collor de Mello’s last-gasp efforts to have the arrest order annulled.
His lawyers told local media the arrest came as he was about to travel to the capital Brasilia to turn himself in.
Moraes ordered he be incarcerated in an individual cell in a “special wing” of Baldomero Cavalcanti de Oliveira prison in Maceio.
His lawyers said they would seek permission for him to serve his sentence under house arrest.
Collor de Mello is not Brazil’s first president to fall foul of the law.
Four of the seven people who have led the country since the 1964-1985 military dictatorship have either been convicted, jailed or impeached.
In the latest case, far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro has been ordered to stand trial over an alleged coup plot after losing the 2022 election.
While recovering in hospital this week from intestinal surgery, a court official handed the 70-year-old a summons giving him five days to submit his initial defense.