Covid CPI: former director of Brazil’s Ministry of Health rejects all allegations as lies

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In testimony before the Brazilian Covid CPI on Wednesday, 7, former Director of Logistics at the Ministry of Health Roberto Dias attributed the accusations against him to possible retaliation against deputy Luis Miranda (DEM-DF) for “economic frustrations.” He denied the accusations, saying they were all made by people who were “disqualified.”

Miranda and his brother, Luis Ricardo, a ministry official, accuse Dias of pressure to release the Indian vaccine Covaxin in March, despite irregularities in the contract. In another complaint, trade representative Luiz Paulo Dominguetti says the former director asked for a bribe to advance negotiations for the AstraZeneca vaccine in February.

“The great truth is that I have been the victim of attacks against my honor and integrity by two inexperienced people, without anything, absolutely nothing, having been proven and will not be proven. One can only prove what is done. Since I never did it, it will never be proven,” Dias said.

In his testimony before the CPI, on the last day 25, Luis Ricardo showed a message from Dias on a Saturday night, in which the then director asks what the progress of the license to import the vaccine was. It was one of the pieces of evidence presented by the staff member for the push to release Covaxin.

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The message, Dias said, “did not refer to Covaxin in any way.” It was about a shipment from AstraZeneca that would arrive the next day. “My concern was that the vaccine was in sanitary or customs clearance without any problems,” he said. “I never put any pressure on the employee, let alone that this message would reveal such a fact,” he affirmed.

Dias said that when the Miranda brothers’ complaint surfaced, he thought the reason was the fact that he had denied Luis Ricardo a position in the ministry. Still, he considered the reaction “too disproportionate.” His hypothesis now is that there was a “frustration also in the economic field.”

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“So far, it has been reported that the deputy would have been passed over in the political expectations he craved. So could business and economic claims also have been thwarted?” asked Dias. The former director said Luis Miranda “has a controversial curriculum.”

Bribery

Dias also denied allegations that he asked Dominguetti for a $1-per-dose bribe to advance negotiations for 400 million vaccine doses from AstraZeneca. According to the trade representative, the incident occurred during a dinner at the Vasto restaurant in a Brasília shopping center on Feb. 25.

The former director confirmed that he was at the restaurant with Dominguetti and that they talked about vaccines but denied any conversation about bribery. Dias said he had gone to Vasto “to have a beer with a friend.” Marcelo Blanco would have appeared with Dominguetti, whom he said he did not know until then.

“He said he represented a company that owned 400 million doses of the vaccine from the manufacturer AstraZeneca. At this point, he said that this had already been circulating in the Ministry of Health, but the necessary documentation had never been submitted. At that moment, I mentioned the name of Mr. Cristiano,” Dias said.

Cristiano Carvalho is Davati’s official representative in Brazil, who called on Dominguetti in June to denounce the alleged claim of a bribe to a Folha de S. Paulo journalist. Dias said Cristiano’s name came up, and he then asked Dominguetti to send the documents to the ministry.

The freelance representative personally went to the ministry to deliver the documents. “I took care of him,” Dias said. But the documents were not enough to proceed with the negotiation, he said. “The documents turned out to be more of the same; there was no representation letter from the manufacturer,” he said. “There was never a request from me, apart from documents that were never produced,” he said.

According to him, “it was clear in the CPI that the autonomous representative of Davati Medical Supply was a swindler who tried to apply fraud and the Ministry of Health. During the testimony in the CPI, Dias said, he “provided further proof of his dishonesty and showed that he is not worthy of any recognition by this House.”