The mayor of the Brazilian city of Araucaria married a 16-year-old girl and the next day, appointed his new mother-in-law Secretary of Culture and Tourism. This was reported this Tuesday by the Public Ministry, which has opened an investigation for nepotism into the councilor, Hissam Hussein Dehaini, 65.

Although marriage at the age of 16 is provided for by law in exceptional cases, the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating him because the appointment benefited the mother of the adolescent, who had to approve the union of the minor for it to have legal validity.

The civil marriage was celebrated on April 12, one day after the minorwho was the city’s teenage beauty queen, turned 16the age at which a minor can legally formalize a marital union if they have the prior approval of their parents.

A day later, the Official Gazette of the municipality published the decree by which the mayor appointed Marilene Rode Secretary of Culture and Tourism, with a salary of 21,416 reais -some 4,232.4 dollars- per month. Until then, the mother-in-law was an official in the Ministry of Education with a much lower salary.

The case has generated a political scandal in Araucaria, a municipality in the metropolitan area of ​​Curitiba, fueled by the information that it was the deputy mayor of Araucaria, 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, during a previous term, the mayor granted public office to his then wife, two of his daughters and a brother-in-lawwhich at the time was the subject of an investigation that ended up being archived.

The Mayor’s Office, for its part, has defended 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 Prosecutor’s Office, for its part, alleges that the Constitution expressly prohibits nepotism: that occupants of executive positions by public mandate appoint, hire or favor relatives in positions of public power.