Settlement Reached in Santos’ Brazilian Bad Checks Case

Brazilian prosecutors and attorneys for Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., have reached a deal to settle a 2008 case in which he was accused of defrauding a clerk in Rio de Janeiro of $1,300 of clothes and shoes after writing bad checks for the purchases.

According to a petition from Santos’ attorney obtained by CNN, Santos is to formally confess to and pay damages to the clerk, as required under the law in Brazil.

In a memo from the prosecutors, who agreed to the deal last week, Santos’ defense team was asked for assurances that they could contact the victim to repay him before the deal was finalized.

The petition from Santos’ attorney was filed in January and requested the agreement instead of a trial for him, and argued that as he is gainfully employed, and he’s also “re-socialized.”

The document also requested that Santo could be contacted through email or by phone and that the proceedings be done through videoconferencing.

Such agreements can be reached in nonviolent cases or in charges where the defendant can be sentenced to less than four years behind bars.

Santos did not comment on the case.

The congressman, who was elected in November, told police in 2010 that he had written bad checks with a stolen checkbook that had belonged to an elderly man his mother had been caring for.

However, he told the New York Post in December he had not been charged with any crime in Brazil and that he was “not a criminal here, not here or in Brazil or Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world. Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”

Brazilian authorities, though, couldn’t find an address to serve him papers after he returned to the United States. They reopened the case in January.