text: On 14 September 2016, prosecutors filed corruption charges against Lula, accusing him of being the mastermind or 'maximum commander of the scheme'. On 19 September 2016, 13th Circuit (Paraná) federal judge Sergio Moro, who was leading the corruption probe, accepted an indictment for money laundering against Lula and his wife Marisa Letícia Lula da Silva. On 11 May 2017, Lula answered a summons by appearing in Curitiba and was questioned by Moro. The closed-court hearing lasted five hours. Thousands of Lula supporters went to Curitiba, together with Dilma Rousseff. After the hearing, Lula and Rousseff gave speeches to his supporters; Lula attacked what he called bias in the Brazilian media.
  Guilty verdict and sentencing
  Lula was found guilty by the lower court of accepting  in bribes ($ US) in the form of improvements to his beachfront house, made by construction company , which in turn received lucrative contracts from the state-owned oil company Petrobras. Lula also faced other charges, including money laundering, influence peddling and obstruction of justice. On 12 July 2017, Sergio Moro sentenced Lula to nine and a half years in prison. Lula remained free pending his appeal. Lula's lawyer accused the judge of bias and the judge replied that nobody, not even the former president, should be above the rule of law.
  On 25 January 2018, the Appeal Court of Porto Alegre found Lula guilty of corruption and money laundering and increased his sentence to 12 years of prison for one of the nine charges, while the other eight were still pending. On 26 March 2018, that same court upheld its own sentence, thus ending the case in that court.