The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) upheld today (3), by 4 votes to 3, the disapproval of the campaign accounts of the mayor of Belo Horizonte, Alexandre Kalil, referring to the 2016 campaign, when he was elected for the first time to administer the mining capital.
The case concerns the use of R$ 2.2 million from Kalil himself to finance his 2016 campaign. The Regional Electoral Court of Minas Gerais (TRE-MG) considered insufficient the explanations given by the then candidate on the origin of the funds and, in 2017, it disapproved the accounts, determining the payment of the same amount to the public coffers.
The rapporteur of the case in the TSE, Minister Sergio Banhos, maintained the decision that disapproved the accounts, in a monocratic way. This Thursday (3), the plenary judged an appeal by Kalil, maintaining the understanding.
To the Electoral Court, the mayor of BH stated that the money came from the sale of a property in the Lourdes neighborhood, in the capital of Minas Gerais, which was purchased by his three children. He presented the transaction agreement and his current account statements showing the inflow and outflow of funds.
Baths, however, understood that the decision of the TRE-MG was correct in concluding that the documents presented “were not sufficient to demonstrate the real origin of the resources received by the candidate”.
Concluding in the opposite direction would require re-examining the evidence in the case file, which would not be possible in the TSE. The ministers Edson Fachin, Carlos Horbach and Luís Roberto Barroso followed the same understanding.
The ministers Mauro Campbell Marques, Benedito Gonçalves and Alexandre de Moraes were defeated in the case, for whom the TRE-MG was unable to demonstrate any illegality in the transaction that gave rise to the campaign funds, having disapproved the accounts only for finding the origin “strange”. of resources.
“The legal transaction was concluded by larger, capable parties, there is proof of the inflow of resources, of the outflow of resources, without any proof of fraud or simulation”, said Moraes. For the minister, the movement of resources “cannot be described as strange”.
