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The Brazilian social security minister, Carlos Lupi, has taken nine days after the police had unveiled a large corruption scandal that endangered pensioners of $ 1.1 billion (£ 829 million).
The Federal Police claims that the National Social Security Institute (Inss) has made unauthorized offenses of payments to millions of pensioners in the last decade.
The money is reportedly paid to various associations and trade unions, which then shared the income with corrupt government officials.
Lupi has always denied misconduct and said he ordered an investigation as soon as he heard about the allegations.
“I make this decision with the certainty that my name was never mentioned in the ongoing investigation at any time,” Lupi wrote on X when he announced his resignation.
“I hope that the studies follow their natural course, those who are responsible and punish, with strictness, those who used their positions to identify the working people,” he wrote.
Operation no discount (Discounted In Portuguese), 700 federal agents have seen 211 search conceptions in Brazil, The federal police said in a statement.
Assets with a value of more than $ 177 million have been seized – including luxury cars, jewelry and more than $ 200,000 cash.
The fraud would register as members of pensioners associations without their permission, but as a result they had regularly deducted money from their benefits for the memberships.
The police said that the scheme was aimed at some of the poorest parts of the country, where pensioners would probably not notice or complained about fraud.
The head of the Inss resigned last week about the allegations and six officials were removed from their positions, the federal police said.
Researchers focus on more than 6 billion real ones that they think they were diverted between 2019-2024, but how much of that money was taken illegal remains unclear.
The director of the budgets and finances of the Inss, Débora Floriano, said that a Task Force will be set up to return the missing money, but at this stage they still try to determine the size of the fraud.
Carlos Lupi is the second person in the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to lose their position due to accusations of corruption in less than a month.
At the beginning of April, Minister of Communication Juscelino Filho resigned after being accused of taking bribes in 2022.
Lula herself spent 1.5 years in prison for corruption in 2018-2019, but the conviction was later thrown away, allowing him to run – and won – his third term as president of Brazil.
