BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s Congress early yesterday upheld key presidential vetoes to avert a surge in public expenditure and postponed a decision on a possible salary increase for judiciary employees, in a rare victory for an embattled government struggling to rebalance its fiscal accounts.
Lawmakers decided to uphold President Dilma Rousseff’s veto of a bill to remove social security taxes on diesel fuel purchases. The bill would have cost the government 64.6 billion reais ($15.95 billion) in lost revenue until 2019, according to official data.
Lawmakers also maintained the veto of a bill to allow workers to retire earlier with full pension benefits.
The proposed formula to calculate the retirement age of workers would have raised public expenditure by an extra 1.1 trillion reais until 2050, government data showed.
After a long session extending beyond the midnight hour, Congress postponed the vote on two vetoes of bills that threatened to raise public expenditure in coming years: a hefty wage hike for judiciary employees and a raise in benefit payments for retirees. Congress has not yet set a date for voting on the remaining vetoes.
