Mensalão Fugitive Pizzolato Says He Fled Brazil to Save His Life

10/29/2014 - 09h09

Henrique Pizzolato, ex-marketing director of the Banco do Brasil and one of those found guilty of involvement in the mensalão scandal, has said that he fled to Europe to save his life.

On Tuesday (28), an Italian court refused his extradition and Pizzolato was freed.

"I didn't run away, I saved my life. Don't you think it's worth it?" he said, after leaving the Sant'Anna prison in Modena, in the north of Italy, where he had been detained since February.

Pizzolato has dual Italian-Brazilian nationality.

When asked if he had been threatened, Pizzolato was vague. "Nobody threatened me. I didn't need threats. I know how to read things."

Wearing a coat, a checked shirt and a pair of jeans, Pizzolato carried his personal items in three plastic bags. He seemed dazed upon leaving prison.

While he now has freedom of movement within Italy, Pizzolato is not allowed to leave the country until a definitive decision is made about his future.

Brazil is due to appeal to the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court of appeal, against the Italian decision that Brazilian prisons do not offer humanitarian conditions.

Pizzolato found a group of journalists waiting for him upon his exit from prison. He ignored all questions put to him and spoke only in response to a question from an Italian journalist.

"Here the judges don't let themselves by guided by the media. They follow the law, they follow evidence. It's not like in Brazil, where they hide documents in order to condemn the innocent," said Pizzolato, in Italian.

Afterwards, he repeated in Portuguese the arguments in his defense. Pizzolato denies diverting money from the Visanet fund - one of the reasons he was sentenced to 12 years and seven months of prison for the crimes of corruption, embezzlement and money laundering.

"It was a false, unfair trial. They hid proof. The Federal Police and the National Institute of Criminology made it quite clear that I had nothing to do with any of that," he said.
"My conscience is clean. I haven't lost a single night's sleep because of my conscience."

Pizzolato refused to discuss the circumstances of his flight from Brazil last September. He used Italian documents in the name of his brother Celso, who died in an accident in 1978. He was arrested again in February.

He also claimed he neither requested nor received any help from the governing Workers' Party (PT), and said that he "didn't know" about Dilma Rousseff's re-election on Sunday (26).

"Thanks for the news," he said, in an ironic tone of voice, when someone told him that election had been the tightest in the history of the country. He said he did not feel anger, but "indifference" regarding his sentence in the mensalão trial.

Translated by TOM GATEHOUSE

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	Reprodução/TV Band
	Henrique Pizzolato, one of those found guilty of involvement in the mensalão scandal, has said that he fled to Europe to save his life