During an INSS CPMI meeting, Deputy Paulo Pimenta (PT-RS) played a pagode song to provoke former Minister Onyx Lorenzoni. The song's chorus about human errors referenced Lorenzoni's past admissions of campaign irregularities. The gesture came amid questions about donations from a businessman investigated in the INSS scandal.
The Joint Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPMI) on the National Social Security Institute (INSS) held a session on Thursday (November 6) with the testimony of former Minister Onyx Lorenzoni from Jair Bolsonaro's (PL) government. During his speaking time, Deputy Paulo Pimenta (PT-RS) played the song “Velocidade da Luz” by the Rio de Janeiro pagode group Revelação as a provocation to the opposition. “I would leave a homage to all who apologize and are rehabilitated,” said Pimenta, referring to the chorus: “Todo mundo erra sempre, todo mundo vai errar” (Everyone makes mistakes always, everyone will make mistakes).
Pimenta criticized the Bolsonaro government for loosening social security rules starting in 2019, which he said enabled undue discounts on retirees and pensioners, the core issue of the investigation. “The Brazilian people have already understood why this scheme became what it became, this monster it became, because it was allowed, mainly from 2019 onward, within the Bolsonaro government, for all these changes to happen. The rules were loosened,” he stated.
Lorenzoni was confronted about a R$ 60,000 donation from Felipe Macedo Gomes, a director of Amar Brasil and investigated in the scandal, for his 2022 Rio Grande do Sul gubernatorial campaign. The former minister said he did not know the donor. The INSS scandal, revealed by Metrópoles in December 2023, involved frauds in association affiliations, with R$ 2 billion collected in one year and thousands of lawsuits. The reports led to Operation Sem Desconto, launched by the Federal Police on April 23, 2024, resulting in the dismissals of the INSS president and Minister Carlos Lupi.
In the past, Lorenzoni admitted in 2020 to receiving R$ 300,000 from JBS in undeclared funds for the 2012 and 2014 campaigns. In 2017, he confessed to R$ 100,000 undeclared in 2014 and apologized: “I want to apologize to the voter who trusts me for the mistake committed. But I will assume it in front of the Public Ministry and the judge of the case. [...] I will tell the truth, even if that truth is hard against me.”