SAO PAULO--Brazilian police arrested former Finance Minister Guido Mantega on Thursday as a sweeping corruption investigation further struck at the heart of the Workers Party (PT) that ran the country for 13 years.
Police investigators told a news conference they took Mantega, long a confidant of recently impeached former President Dilma Rousseff and an early member of the PT, into custody at the Albert Einstein Hospital in Sao Paulo. He was there accompanying his wife as she prepared for surgery.
Quoting witness testimony, they said Mantega in 2012 had requested a payment of 5 million reais, or about $2.5 million at the time, to benefit the PT. Brazil's longest-serving finance minister of the past 70 years, Mantega in 2012 was also the chairman of Petroleo Brasiliero, or Petrobras, the state-run oil company at the center of a sprawling political kickback scheme.
A few hours after his arrest, federal judge Sergio Moro ordered Mantega released from custody, which he was at about 2 p.m. local time after being detained for eight hours. Moro ruled that Mantega's cooperation with authorities, the fact they had already searched his home, and that he was supporting his wife as she fights cancer all indicated the former minister was unlikely to be a threat to interfere with the investigation.
His arrest came two days after Moro decided to put former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on trial for allegedly accepting more than $1 million in bribes from an engineering firm in the Petrobras scandal.
Mantega, 67, served as finance minister for almost nine years under Rousseff and Lula, a close friend whom he helped become elected president in 2002. He helped steer Latin America's largest economy through a commodities boom at the height of Workers Party rule, but came under withering criticism in 2011 and beyond as the economy began sliding into its worst recession since the 1930s. Mantega left office in 2015 at the start of Rousseff's second term after years of complaints from critics about faulty economic forecasts and ineffective industrial policies.
