By Ricardo Brito
BRASILIA (Reuters) -Former Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello was arrested on Friday in the northeastern city of Maceio after a Supreme Court justice rejected his challenges against a previous conviction and ordered him to start serving jail time.
Collor’s lawyer, Marcelo Bessa, said he was arrested at 4:00 a.m. local time (0700 GMT) while traveling to Brazil’s capital Brasilia, where he planned to turn himself in following Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ arrest order.
The former president was being held by federal police in Maceio, the capital of Alagoas state, Bessa said in a statement.
Moraes’ order on Thursday came after the top court sentenced Collor, the first president to win the popular vote after the end of Brazil’s last military dictatorship in 1985, to eight years and 10 months in prison in 2023 on corruption and money laundering charges.
Collor’s lawyer had already voiced “surprise and concern” at Moraes’ decision in an initial statement released late on Thursday, but added that the former president would comply with the order.
The 2023 conviction came after Brazilian prosecutorsaccused Collor of receiving around 30 million reais ($5.28 million) in bribes from a then subsidiary of state-run oil company Petrobras.
Collor took office as president in 1990, but did not finish his term as Congress decided to impeach him two years later amid a separate corruption scandal for which Supreme Court acquitted him in 1994.
He was later elected as a senator representing the state of Alagoas. He left Congress in early 2023 following an unsuccessful bid for governor of Alagoas.
($1 = 5.6805 reais)
(Reporting by Ricardo Brito in Brasilia; Writing by Andre Romani and Gabriel Araujo; Editing by Brendan O’Boyle, Michael Perry and Joe Bavier)
