Brazil reopens fraud case against Santos as he enters congress

The Republican representative is accused of stealing cheques in 2008 to buy sneakers in Rio de Janeiro.

George Santos sits alone at the back on the Republican side of the chamber on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

Embattled Republican representative George Santos from New York spent his first day in congress dodging reporters and voting in the contentious race for speaker, while Brazilian authorities said they intended to reopen a criminal investigation into allegations that he committed cheque fraud there in 2008.

Mr Santos, a 34-year-old who won a narrow victory for Republicans in a district of Long Island usually dominated by the Democrats, has faced scrutiny in recent weeks after admitting that he had lied to voters about his work and education history.

Federal and local prosecutors in the US are investigating Mr Santos over the fabrications. He has faced calls from Democrats to resign while the house Republican leadership has remained largely silent on the matter.

Mr Santos himself was also largely silent Tuesday.

Shortly before the house gavelled in at noon, Mr Santos left his office in the Longworth House Office Building and was followed by about a dozen reporters, all shouting questions at the freshman legislator as he made his way through the halls of numerous house office buildings.

Mr Santos said nothing in response to the dozens of questions lobbed at him about the investigations in Brazil and elsewhere, other than affirming that he would vote for Republican leader Kevin McCarthy for speaker.

At times, Mr Santos was clearly lost, needing to double back numerous times. At one point, he seemed to ask a house employee for directions.

He arrived on the house floor and took a seat alone in the back on the Republican side of the chamber. As members of congress mingled all around him and chatted with each other, he didn’t engage with anyone and no one had engaged with him. He occasionally stared at his phone and looked around, and then was one of 203 Republicans who voted for Mr McCarthy for speaker on the first ballot — not enough to win him the top job.

In Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday, public prosecutors said in a statement that they have requested a court reopen the fraud case against Mr Santos once the judges return from recess in the coming days. The case had been suspended because police had been unable to find him, but his whereabouts became known due to media coverage of his falsehoods during his campaign for congress.

At the age of 19, Mr Santos was in Rio de Janeiro, where his Brazilian mother, Fatima Devolder, was working as a nurse for a man named Delio Alemao, who had entrusted her with his cheque book, according to court records. Mr Santos took two of the blank cheques to buy some $US1300 worth of goods at a clothing store, including a pair of sneakers, as presents for his friend, according to court documents and the police.

The store reported the crime after Mr Santos’s friend returned to the shop to try to exchange the sneakers, which allowed them to trace the checks back to Mr Santos.

An employee later spoke to Mr Santos on Orkut, a once-popular now-extinct social media site in Brazil, where he admitted the crime, according to court documents. Mr Santos wrote to the employee on the messaging site, apologising, saying: “I know I messed up, but I want to pay.” A representative didn’t respond to a request for comment on Tuesday but Mr Santos previously said he hasn’t committed any crimes and still intends to serve in congress.

“I’m not a fraud,” he said in an interview last week on WABC. “If I disappointed anyone by resume embellishment, I’m sorry, and I will deliver to you on everything I campaigned on.” Mr Santos had acknowledged lying about graduating from Baruch College. He also admitted that he never worked directly for Wall Street firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs as he had previously suggested on his campaign’s website.

Mr Santos had embraced what he has said is his Jewish identity during interviews and at events, and his campaign website stated that his grandparents fled Jewish persecution in Europe during World War II. He referred to himself as a “proud American Jew” in a campaign document.

But Brazilian court documents showed that he described himself as a Catholic on Orkut. Fabio Koifman, professor of history at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal Rural University, who studied online records of Mr Santos’s family tree, said there is no evidence that any members of his family were Jewish or that they fled the Holocaust.

The Wall Street Journal