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Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been sentenced to nine years and six months in prison after being found guilty on corruption and money-laundering charges, The Guardian reported.

Passing sentence on the former president, Judge Sergio Moro said Lula took part in the corruption scheme, in which billions of dollars were paid to middlemen, executives and politicians for fat contracts.

Lula still faces four more trials, in a process defence lawyers say constitutes a judicial blitzkrieg designed to prevent him returning to politics.

The source reminds that no other Brazilian politician in recent decades has been able to capture popular imagination with such verve. Although his reputation has been tarnished in recent years, he currently leads polling for the 2018 election.

If his conviction is upheld by a higher court, however, he will be ineligible to stand.
Wednesday’s sentence was related to accusations that Lula benefited from about £590,000 in bribes from a construction company called OAS, which the prosecution alleged was paid in the shape of a seaside duplex apartment, renovated at Lula’s request.

In his ruling, Moro said that Lula had bought a simpler apartment in the same building worth about £53,000, and the company had upgraded him.

Prosecutors said the payment was part of around £21m that OAS paid in bribes to Lula’s Workers’ party in return for lucrative contracts as part of two oil refineries that Petrobras was building, Moro wrote in his sentence.