{"id":94179,"date":"2025-05-03T04:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-03T04:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/03\/social-security-minister-latest-to-quit-in-major-pensions-fraud-scandal\/"},"modified":"2025-05-03T04:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T04:14:11","slug":"social-security-minister-latest-to-quit-in-major-pensions-fraud-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/03\/social-security-minister-latest-to-quit-in-major-pensions-fraud-scandal\/","title":{"rendered":"Social security minister latest to quit in major pensions fraud scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Brazil’s Social Security Minister, Carlos Lupi, has resigned nine days after police unveiled a major corruption scandal which defrauded pensioners of $1.1bn (\u00a3829m).<\/p>\n

Federal police allege that over the past decade, the National Social Security Institute (INSS) made unauthorised deductions from payments made to millions of pensioners. <\/p>\n

The money was allegedly paid to several associations and unions, which then shared the earnings with corrupt government officials. <\/p>\n

Lupi has always denied any wrongdoing and said he ordered an investigation as soon as he heard about the allegations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“I am making this decision with the certainty that my name has not been mentioned at any time in the ongoing investigations,” Lupi wrote on X when announcing his resignation.<\/p>\n

“I hope that the investigations follow their natural course, identify those responsible and punish, with rigor, those who used their positions to harm the working people,” he wrote.<\/p>\n

Operation No Discount (Sem Desconto<\/i> in Portuguese) has seen 700 federal agents issue 211 search warrants across Brazil, federal police said in a statement<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Assets worth more than $177m have been seized – including luxury cars, jewellery and more than $200,000 in cash.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The fraud allegedly involved registering pensioners as members of retirees’ associations without their consent, but as a result they had money regularly deducted from their benefits for the memberships.<\/p>\n

Police said the scheme targeted some of the poorest areas of the country, where pensioners were unlikely to notice the fraud or complain about it.<\/p>\n

The head of the INSS resigned last week over the allegations, and six public servants have been removed from their posts, federal police said.<\/p>\n

Investigators are focusing on more than 6bn real they believe was diverted between 2019-2024, but how much of that money was taken illegally remains unclear.<\/p>\n

The INSS’s director of budgets and finance, D\u00e9bora Floriano, said a task force will will be set up to return the missing money, but at this stage they are still trying to determine the size of the fraud.<\/p>\n

Carlos Lupi is the second person in President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government to lose their position due to corruption allegations in less than a month.<\/p>\n

In early April, communications minister Juscelino Filho stepped down after he was charged with taking bribes in 2022.<\/p>\n

Lula himself spent 1.5 years in prison in 2018-2019 for corruption, but the conviction was later thrown out, allowing him to run – and win – his third term as Brazil’s president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brazil’s Social Security Minister, Carlos Lupi, has resigned nine days after police unveiled a major corruption scandal which defrauded pensioners of $1.1bn (\u00a3829m). Federal police<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":94180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[169],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}