Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's newly elected President, decided on her own to help financially her ailing Bulgarian half-brother in 2006, Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) learned.

Dilma Rousseff, the first woman to become President of Brazil, is the daughter of Bulgarian immigrant Petar Rousseff (1900-1962), who left Bulgaria in 1929. Dilma's Bulgarian half-brother from Rusev's first marriage was Lyuben-Kamen Rusev (1930-2008).

In 2006, Lyuben Rusev, a successful Bulgarian engineer who by that time was a childless and ailing old man living in Sofia with his wife, received a certain sum of money from his sister in Brazil without having requested it, Bulgarian diplomat Rumen Stoyanov told Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) in an exclusive interview.

Stoyanov, a long-time Bulgarian diplomat in Brazil and a professor of Latin American studies, helped Lyuben Rusev by translating into Portuguese letters to his sister Dilma, who by that time had become part of the Cabinet of Brazil's President Lula da Silva.

Stoyanov is positive that Lyuben Rusev never asked his sister for any money but that she must have decided on her own to do this generous gesture, i.e. to help out her brother who she really wanted to meet but never managed to.

The former diplomat, who first met Dilma Rousseff's mother in Belo Horizonte in 1973, says this occurred after a few years ago he accompanied Bulgaria's honorary consul in Rio de Janeiro, Joao Vaz, in 2005 to meet Lyuben Rusev.

"One day I got a phone call from a Brazilian man, who told me he was in the Kempinski hotel in Sofia, and that I should go there because he had something for me. I went to pick that thing and it turned out to be a sum in euro sent by Dilma Rousseff to her brother, without the brother ever having requested money from her. I can verify that as a translator of the letter. I don't know if it is appropriate for me to reveal the exact sum but it was a certain amount of euro ending in three zeros. I gave it to her brother. I suppose that the consul told something to Dilma Rousseff, and she decided that it was good idea to help her brother out financially," Stoyanov said.

Full Text of Novinite.com's interview with former diplomat Stoyanov READ HERE