Eduardo Cunha, the former speaker of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, was removed from office Monday night by a landslide vote in the chamber of 450 votes to 10 with nine abstentions.

Lawmakers decided overwhelmingly that Cunha had lied during the investigation into corruption at Brazil's state-run oil company, Petrobras, and had hid millions of dollars in offshore accounts. On top of losing his seat as speaker, Cunha also loses all political privileges for eight years.

Cunha had resigned as speaker of the Chamber of Deputies in July, and was already suspended as speaker in May by the Supreme Court, at the request of the attorney general, who accused him of obstructing justice and hiding millions of dollars in bribes in Swiss bank accounts.

The corruption investigation has already brought down some of the country's top political and business leaders.

By being voted out, Cunha loses partial immunity from prosecution offered to members of Congress and high-ranking politicians. The Senate and the Chamber of Deputies make up the country's Congress. When announcing his resignation earlier in the summer, Cunha, who has been widely compared to the character Frank Underwood in the TV series "House of Cards," had said: "I will continue to defend my innocence and that I told the truth." In July, the congressional ethics committee voted to strip him of his congressional seat. Although resigning as speaker, he still hung on to the seat until Monday's denouement. Cunha had launched his bid to impeach Rousseff, the country's first female leader, in December 2015, accusing the then-leader of hiding a budgetary deficit to win re-election in 2014. Her opponents also blamed her for the worst recession in decades. At the end of August, Brazil's Senate voted 61-20 in favor of removing her from office. </s> RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s lower house of Congress voted overwhelmingly late Monday to strip the legislative seat of its former speaker amid accusations of corruption and obstruction of justice.

The Chamber of Deputies voted 450 to 10 to remove Eduardo Cunha after hours of debate. Nine legislators abstained.

As speaker, Eduardo Cunha was the main driver behind the impeachment process that led to the Senate trying left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff and removing her from office last month. He has been a key ally of new President Michel Temer, who had been Rousseff’s vice president.

Cunha has been accused by Brazilian prosecutors of receiving millions of dollars in bribes linked to the sprawling corruption scandal at state-run oil giant Petrobras. But the issue before the Chamber of Deputies was only whether he lied about having secret banking accounts in Switzerland.

Cunha, who said the accounts belonged to a trust, was pressured into resigning as speaker after the accounts came to light, but he had refused to give up his post as a lawmaker.

With the loss of his congressional seat, Cunha also loses his partial immunity from prosecution. In Brazil, only the country’s top court can decide to charge and try federal lawmakers.

Cunha, who had been in his fourth term as a lawmaker, told his colleagues during the debate that the Rousseff impeachment effort was the reason for the drive to remove him.

“This is all because I opened the impeachment proceedings. The (governing) Worker’s Party wants a trophy to say this was a coup,” Cunha said. “This criminal of a government of yours is now gone thanks to me.” </s> Brazilians concerned with rampant corruption in their political system have reason to rejoice today: the man who many consider the most corrupt politician in Brazil – a title for which there is much competition, and who had been removed from office in May – finally had his mandate ended.

In May, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice determined that Eduardo Cunha, the former President of the Chamber of Deputies, a position equivalent to the Speaker of the House in the U.S., should have his term suspended.

Tonight, in a session that was at times nasty and personal and that lasted through the night, the Chamber voted to end Cunha's mandate. Cunha was most recently caught lying about having offshore (Swiss) bank accounts. (He argued, among other things, that the accounts were his wife's.)

At the end, 450 Congressmembers voted to end his mandate. Only 10 voted in favor of him. 10, a dramatically low number for the man who used to run Brazil's politics. It's a comment on how quickly the tides can turn in Brazil. And it might also signal a new era in Brazil's attempts to fight corruption.

Interestingly, Cunha's few supporters claimed that he was being judged not on the law but on public opinion. That is the same argument supporters of the impeached Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff have made.

In May, the justice explained the decision by citing the numerous and varied corruption proceedings that Cunha is currently caught up in. Some of those proceedings are related to graft charges in the massive Car Wash corruption investigation into Petrobras contacts that has washed over top-tier politicians of all political parties, including former president Luiz Ignacio da Silva. Some of those investigations are related to the good old-fashioned pay-to-play-politics that seem to dominate Brazilian governance.

The justice, Teori Zavascki, noted that Cunha's mandate as leader of the lower house, "is not an empty title authorizing expectations of power that are unlimited, irresponsible and meaningless." He noted that there was evidence that Cunha set up a "network of obstruction" to shield himself from anti-corruption investigations.

"I think this is a great sign," argued Rodrigo Fernandes, a São Paulo venture capitalist. "It's a sign that we are not going to tolerate corruption, no matter the [political] party."

While the arrival of Cunha in the crosshairs of Brazil's anti-corruption crusade is a watershed moment for the country, it is one that was not at all inevitable.

For decades – yes, decades – Eduardo Cunha has escaped prosecution on corruption charges, despite being implicated in case after case. For many Brazilians, he is the symbol of political malevolence, a bad guy who outsmarts the Brazilian public again and again.

Related: He also happens to be one of the most powerful politician in Brazil.

It is Cunha who ran the impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff before he was removed in May, which resulted in her impeachment by the lower house that he governs. During those proceedings he was the target of leftists' ire, as they pointed their fingers at him and called him a "scoundrel" and his proceeding a "coup". He was even called a "gangster" to his face by one Congressman. (Catch the word "gangster" in the beginning of the video below).

A full recap of the most outrageous moments from that proceeding can be found here.

Despite the hate aimed his way by his political enemies during the impeachment proceeding, Cunha found a way to grin as his political supporters approached the microphone that Sunday and voted to impeach the President.

The grin is likely gone tonight. Brazilian social media is currently exploding with reactions to the news that Brazil's most invincible politician is politically dead. Many Brazilians are adjusting the anti-Rousseff chant of "Tchau, querida" (Bye, sweetheart) into the masculine form to create an anti-Cunha mantra: "Tchau, querido." Others are taking liberties with the fact that Cunha's name begins with the letters for a vulgar Brazilian word for a certain body part.

"It would be very hard to find somebody that would be against the removal of Cunha at this point," notes Natalia Ribeiro, a graduate student in political science in Brasília. "Maybe there is, but I doubt someone would argue publicly against it."

Fernandes, like many Brazilians, was in favor of the impeachment of Rousseff. But that doesn't mean he is a Cunha supporter. "The fact that he helped pushed the impeachment forward is not going to give him a free pass, despite what he might have thought."

But, at the same time, Brazilians will have a hard time counting him out. Cunha, an evangelical Christian radio announcer, is Brazil's rubberman, a man who wriggles his way out of any net. Tonight, the net seems to have finally closed. </s> Brazilian President Michel Temer was allegedly caught in a secret audio recording authorizing the head of meatpacking giant JBS SA to pay bribes to buy the silence of disgraced political leader Eduardo Cunha, who is serving a 15-year prison sentence for corruption.

The recording was delivered to the Supreme Court on Wednesday as part of evidence in a plea-bargain deal that JBS’s Joesley Batista is seeking in relation to the mammoth Lava Jato graft investigation, according to a report in the newspaper O Globo.

The paper’s website crashed in the hour after the story broke.

The news roiled Brazil, as a nation that thought itself inured after three years of political turmoil confronted a dramatic ratcheting up of the level of chaos and uncertainty.

Television channels cut from regular programing to air scenes from Brasilia of top political leaders rushing red-faced and panic-stricken through the hallways of Congress, on their way to meet with Mr. Temer.

The President’s office released a statement confirming he met with Mr. Batista in March but denying the allegations: “President Michel Temer never solicited payments to obtain the silence of former [Congress] deputy Eduardo Cunha. He never participated and never authorized any action with the objective of avoiding testimony or co-operation with the justice system by the former member.”

The Lava Jato investigation has involved a succession of stunning revelations but never anything like this: all previous plea bargains have related to the recounting of bribery and other illegal actions committed in the past. But Mr. Batista, and his brother Wesley, with whom he runs JBS, appear to have been working together with police to entrap political figures in criminal activity.

O Globo reports that in recent weeks trusted Batista staffers delivered sacks of cash containing $1.3-million (Canadian) in numbered bills, tagged with traceable chips, as bribes to politicians, while police filmed.

Mr. Batista allegedly told Lava Jato prosecutors that he has paid $2.2-million to Mr. Cunha just since last October. The tape reportedly records the President saying, “You need to keep this up, got it?”

Mr. Cunha, an evangelical preacher, was the Speaker of the lower house of Congress and the most powerful man in the country until his ignominious downfall. He spearheaded the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff last year. Mr. Temer recently told an interviewer that Mr. Cunha told him he would make sure she was ousted after she refused to shut down an investigation into his actions. In March, Mr. Cunha was sentenced to 15 years for corruption and money-laundering, for taking bribes to ensure the awarding of lucrative state contracts – and then funnelling the money to Swiss bank accounts.

As he was forced out of office, Mr. Cunha warned that he had damaging information on virtually all of his political colleagues – and the O Globo story suggests that Mr. Temer and others have been keen to ensure he didn’t share that information.

Also named in the JBS plea bargain is Aecio Neves, the head of the Brazil Social Democratic Party (PSDB), who narrowly lost the last presidential race to Ms. Rousseff and was considered a contender for president in the next election. He was allegedly recorded asking Mr. Batista for $870,000 on March 24 to pay for expenses related to Lava Jato; he is under investigation for a range of financial crimes.

The Batista brothers have been charged with “crimes against the national finance system,” including misuse of loans from a national development bank.

The Lava Jato investigation has revealed an entrenched and widespread symbiotic relationship between Brazil’s largest businesses, particularly construction firms such as Odebrecht SA and agribusiness heavyweights like JBS. For decades, politicians have accepted off-the-books campaign funding and personal bribes from these companies in exchange for awarding enormous state infrastructure and procurement contracts and writing friendly legislation. A giant swath of the political class, including a third of senators and nearly a third of cabinet ministers, are under investigation or indictment in connection with Lava Jato.

Mr. Temer, alone, has been safe – until now. He has been named in a number of other plea bargains, relating to bribes he allegedly authorized before he took over as President with Ms. Rousseff’s ouster last August. But Brazilian law says he cannot be prosecuted for those crimes while he holds the office of President. However, the incidents in the reported recordings would seem to lead Brazil into new legal territory: these alleged crimes were committed just weeks ago.

“The owners of JBS made a joint plea bargain [to Supreme Court Justice] Edson Fachin, with recordings that link the President Michel Temer to Eduardo Cunha – something that is an atomic bomb,” Chico Alencar, an opposition member of Congress, said in the lower house when the news broke in the late evening. “It just keeps coming, in this country, because we have a corrupt and degenerate political caste.”

The tapes are theoretically part of a sealed deposition, but Brazil’s political crisis over the past two years has played out in a series of leaks to media. If the tapes prove to show what O Globo columnist Lauro Jardim has reported in his explosive story, it raises serious questions about Mr. Temer’s ability to hold the office until his term ends in late 2018.

In other countries, a president might see no option but to resign over news such as this, but this is less likely in Brazil, where Mr. Temer will likely hunker down and take refuge in a blizzard of court processes and bureaucracy.

Within an hour of the story being published, a member from Congress from an opposition party filed an impeachment request. Opposition members of Congress were reported to be negotiating the wording of a proposed constitutional amendment to try to force Mr. Temer out.

Many Brazilians also read into the fact that it was O Globo, a media conglomerate whose wealthy owners were viewed as backers of the Rousseff impeachment and supporters of Mr. Temer, that broke this story – a sign that he has lost their protection, which could complicate his efforts to see out his term.
Eduardo Cunha, former President of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies loses his position as a Deputy following a vote of the Chamber as a result of a series of corruption scandals.