A charged campaign

“IF I talk, there won’t be an election,” Paulo Roberto Costa, a former executive at Petrobras, was supposed to have warned. Mr Costa, arrested in March in a money-laundering probe involving Brazil’s state-controlled oil giant, has started talking. Polling day, less than a month away, will not be cancelled. But if what he says is true, it could affect the outcome.

According to stories published on September 5th in Veja, a leading weekly, and O Estado de S. Paulo, a newspaper, Mr Costa, who ran Petrobras’s refining division from 2004 to 2012, has accused more than 40 politicians of involvement in a vast kickback scheme. The list reportedly includes a minister, three state governors, six senators and dozens of congressmen from President Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT) and several coalition allies. The beneficiaries are alleged to have pocketed 3% of the value of contracts that colluding suppliers signed with Mr Costa’s Petrobras division in return for securing support for the government in congressional votes.