Eduardo Cunha

Eduardo Cosentino da Cunha (born 29 September 1958), is a Brazilian politician and radio host, born in Rio de Janeiro.

Born in Rio de Janeiro on 29 September 1958, Eduardo Cunha is the son of Elcy Teixeira da Cunha and Elza Cosentino.

As his mother descended from Italian immigrants from the town of Castelluccio Inferiore in the region of Basilicata, he also holds Italian citizenship.

When he was 14 years old, he began working part-time as an insurance broker.

Later, he worked as an auditor at the firm Arthur Andersen, from 1978 to 1980.

He majored in economics at the Universidade Candido Mendes, and served as an economist at Xerox of Brazil, between 1980 and 1982.

Cunha has four children.

He is currently married to journalist Cláudia Cruz.

His name was on Panama Papers.

Eduardo Cunha is a conservative Evangelical Christian.

He seeks to ban abortion, increase marijuana penalties, and further restrict homosexual activity.

As an evangelist, Cunha has proposed legislation titled The Law of Heterophobia (in response to the Law of Homophobia).

The law demands a prison sentence of one to three years for anyone who forbids entry to a heterosexual to any public or private property, levies special rates at hotels or restricts the public display of affection.

Cunha holds the reputation of being a "picareta" politician in Brazil.

His first contact with politics was working on the campaigns of Eliseu Resende, a candidate for state government with the Social Democratic Party (PDS) in the 1982 election, and Moreira Franco, a PMDB candidate for Rio de Janeiro government, in the 1986 election.

When Anthony Garotinho was elected Governor of Rio de Janeiro in 1999, he appointed Francisco Silva as Secretary of Housing with Cunha as his deputy.

However, Cunha was in office for just over six months, when he was forced to resign due to allegations of irregularities in no-bid contracts and favoring shell companies.

Then in 2001, the Court of Audit confirmed that there were indeed various irregularities in the bids of these shell companies, including the adulteration of the clearance certificate from state taxes.

With Garotinho's support, in 2001 Cunha assumed a vacant state representative's seat in the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro (ALERJ), which guaranteed him immunity against the public prosecutor's investigations.

He was then elected with 101,495 votes in the follow-up campaign.

Cunha joined the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies on 1 February 2003, representing Rio de Janeiro.

He was elected in the 2006 elections to the House with 130,773 votes.

He was re-elected in 2010 through the PMDB with 150,616 votes.

To the TSE (Brazilian Election Commission), Cunha reported receiving R$4.76 million in donations for the 2010 campaign, of which R$500,000 came from the construction company Camargo Corrêa.

In 2013, Cunha was elected leader of the PMDB in the House.

The following year, he filed a complaint with the Supreme Federal Court against now-Congressman Anthony Garotinho (PR-RJ) for libel and defamation.

On his blog Garotinho had referred to Cunha as a "deputy lobbyist".

House aides and lobbyists with access to PMDB parliamentarians reported that Eduardo Cunha recorded on an agenda a list of companies - mainly linked to energy, telecommunications and construction - who benefited from parliamentary action.

Still, later that year, he was re-elected for another term, obtaining 232,708 votes (the third-most votes received in the State of Rio de Janeiro).

Cunha was indicted in Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato), the scandal involving state-owned oil company Petrobras.

Prosecutors say he "took as much as US$40 million in bribes for himself and his allies, plundering Petrobras, the government-controlled oil company, while laundering money through an evangelical megachurch."

On these charges, prosecutors requested "a potential sentence of 184 years in prison".

He was President of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil from February 2015 until 5 May 2016, when he was removed from the position by the Supreme Court.

BBC News labeled him the "nemesis" of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

He was indicted in the scandal known as Operation Car Wash (Portuguese: Operação Lava Jato) involving the state-owned oil company Petrobras and other corporations.

Cunha was suspended as speaker of the Chamber of Deputies by the Supreme Court on the request of the Prosecutor-General due to allegations that he had attempted to intimidate members of Congress and obstructed investigations into his alleged bribe-taking.

Cunha resigned from his position later, on 7 July 2016, after a disciplinary process in Congress that had lasted nine months, making it the longest in Brazilian Congressional history.

A series of legal manoeuvres had stalled the process and kept Cunha in charge of the Chamber of Deputies.

While the Chamber's Commission of Ethics was divided on the issue until June, the Chamber of Deputies plenary, on 12 September 2016, voted 450–10 in favour of stripping Cunha of his position as federal deputy for breaching parliamentary decorum by lying about secret offshore bank accounts.

On 19 October 2016, Cunha was arrested by the Brazilian Federal Police, accused of hiding approximately US$40 million worth of bribes in secret bank accounts and on trying to tamper with investigations against him.