The mayor of the Brazilian city of Araucaria married a 16-year-old teenager and the day after the ceremony he appointed his new mother-in-law as Secretary of Culture and Tourism for this southern Brazilian municipality, the Public Ministry reported Tuesday.
Despite the fact that marriage with a 16-year-old girl is provided for by law in exceptional cases, the Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation for nepotism against the mayor Hissam Hussein Dehaini, 65, because the appointment benefited the mother of the adolescent, that he had to approve the union of the minor for it to have legal validity.
The civil marriage was contracted on April 12, one day after the young woman, who was the city’s teenage beauty queen, turned 16, the age at which a minor can legally formalize a marital union as soon as they have the prior approval of their parents.
On April 13, a day later, the decree by which the mayor appointed Marilene Rode as his Secretary of Culture and Tourism was published in the Official Gazette of the municipality, with a salary of 21,416 reais (about 4,232.4 dollars). monthly. Until then, the mother-in-law was an official in the Ministry of Education with a much lower salary.
The case generated a political scandal in Araucaria, a municipality in the metropolitan area of ??Curitiba, the capital of the state of Paraná.
The scandal was fueled by the information that it was the deputy mayor of Araucaria herself, Hilda Lukalski Seima, who, as head of the city’s Civil Registry, made the marriage official. Both were elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020 by a coalition of conservative parties.
In 2010, when he held a previous mandate, the mayor granted public office to his then wife, two of his daughters and a brother-in-law, which was the subject of an investigation that ended up being shelved.
The mayor’s office clarified in a note that the appointment is a “discretionary act of the head of the Executive Power, who considered that the official meets the necessary conditions for the exercise of the position, since she has 26 years of experience in public service.”
The Public Ministry, for its part, alleges that the Constitution expressly prohibits nepotism, that is, that occupants of executive positions by public mandate appoint, hire or favor family members in positions of public power. EFE
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