Bolsonaro wants money from the Paulo Gustavo Law in agribusiness

President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) said he intends to direct the R$ 3.86 billion provided for in the Paulo Gustavo Law to agribusiness and Santas Casas across the country, if Congress maintains the veto he gave on Tuesday (5).

The statement is in a video posted on his social networks, in which he appears surrounded by supporters at the Santuário São Miguel Arcanjo, in the city of Bandeirantes, Paraná.

The project, already approved by the Senate, intends to allocate federal government resources to states and municipalities to help the cultural sector recover from the impacts of the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Of the budget, R$ 2.79 billion would go to the audiovisual area, while R$ 1.06 billion would go to emergency actions.

In the same speech, Bolsonaro criticized the use of money in the sector and the governor of Bahia, Rui Costa (PT). “What is Rui Costa going to apply to the culture in Bahia? With those big shots who were left out of the Rouanet Law,” he said.

“I vetoed it because, by the way, we need R$ 2 billion for Santa Casas and R$ 3 billion, more or less, for us to settle the end of agribusiness”, he said, “due to the droughts and other problems we had. money could and may well go there”.

On Tuesday, in a note, the General Secretariat of the Presidency stated that the text would create expenses without presenting compensation in the form of reduced expenses. The bill passed on March 15 in the Senate. The former special secretary of Culture Mário Frias (PL), who left the portfolio to run for federal deputy, came to classify the text as “absurd”.

The amount suggested by the law would not come from the Rouanet Law, but from the National Culture Fund, the FNC —which was created in 1986, before the Rouanet Law, and only ratified by it, in 1991— and from the Audiovisual Sectorial Fund, the FSA. .

In the case of the budgets of these funds, when the resources were not executed by the end of the year, the amount was usually returned to the National Treasury, but with a bond stamp — it continued to belong to the fund and was cumulative over the years.

This changed with the approval of the PEC Emergencial, in March 2021, allowing the Executive Branch to use, until the end of 2023, the financial surplus of some public funds, including the FNC and the FSA, to pay the public debt.

The objective of the project is to redistribute these resources in emergency actions aimed at the cultural sector, as in the case of the Aldir Blanc Law to support culture throughout 2020 — which represented an unprecedented contribution to the Brazilian cultural sector, with R$ 3 billion destined to states, the Federal District and municipalities.

This would happen along the lines of what happens with innovation and science, by freeing the funds of the cultural sector from such “expenditure limitations”, which prevent part of the FNC’s resources from being executed – either by the special secretary of Culture or by any other entities of the cultural public policy.