Brazilian Court Orders Ouster of Mayor for Irregularly Hiring 1,800 People

By Contributing Reporter

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – The 6th Chamber of the São Paulo Appellate Court ordered the dismissal of the Mayor of Campinas, Jonas Donizette, for administrative misconduct. The ruling orders the mayor to forfeit his civil service employment, suspends his political rights for five years and imposes a fine of 30 times his salary, in addition to ordering the dismissal of 1,851 incorrectly appointed municipal employees.

Campinas, 90 kilometers from São Paulo, is the third largest city in the State, with 1.1 million inhabitants, and has one of the highest Human Development Indexes (HDI) in Brazil.

Judge Silvia Meirelles, the rapporteur for the case, asserted that Jonas Donizette had created a “job rack” in the Executive branch by assigning people to public positions that clearly could not be filled by mere appointment.

Meirelles determined that a fine must be paid in the amount of thirty times the mayor’s salary on the date of the ruling. In April, Jonas earned a monthly salary of R$23,894.65. The fine should amount to R$716,000 (US$179,000).

The judge determined that all employees “holding any office specified in the laws as unconstitutional shall be dismissed within thirty days, with the interdiction of new hiring for the same positions and such positions may only to be filled by means of a public bid process.”

The Prosecutor’s Office noted that Campinas had “an unreasonable number of [discretionary] commissioned positions, far greater than those of various countries.” According to the suit, the city had 846 appointments and a further 985 commissioned positions, “an excessive number of 1,851 executive, management or advisory positions.”

It was established that Jonas Donizette freely appointed unfit people for plain bureaucratic duties, on the grounds that these had been discretionary positions.

According to the judge “the evidence is ample in the sense of demonstrating that the appointments for commissioned positions occurred without any technical criteria or to satisfy the public interest; on the contrary, it was merely to cater to the personal interests of political accomplices, favoring certain people.”