The Piquet family has long been a part of the motorsport community. Nelson Piquet cemented himself as a three-time F1 champion. Kelly Piquet is a familiar face in the F1 paddock due to her relationship with Max Verstappen. Julia Piquet is engaged to NASCAR star Daniel Suarez and Nelson Piquet Jr. is an F1 turned Formula E racer. A little further down the family tree, comes his nephew, Cristiano Piquet, who has gotten his family name into a whole lot of trouble.
The Piquet family is big into Brazilian politics. Frequent social media posts do the trick with the younger generation, however, Nelson Piquet is very involved. The F1 champion is close pals with former Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, who had recently been raided for possession of illegal gifts, valued at around $3 million.
Here, Piquet’s nephew gets involved, and could potentially go behind bars for his involvement in the crime. Nelson Piquet’s name got dragged into the conversation as Twitter exploded with tweets regarding yet another problem involving the infamous driver and his family.
Piquet’s nephew in deep waters
The former president’s gifts were not registered as public property. The gifts included sculptures of a palm tree and a golden boat- all collected over the course of his presidential term from foreign lands like Bahrain and Persia. According to the Brazilian news site UOL, the gifts were made of solid gold.
This is where Cristiano Piquet comes in. An avid supporter of Jair Bolsonaro, he took these artifacts from Orlando, where Bolsonaro had kept them, to Miami. There, the former President ordered his close confidant to try and auction the products, but to no avail.
However, the problem is that these are supposed to be possessions of the Brazilian state and cannot be incorporated as personal property. As a result, the investigation was issued after there were police allegations that Bolsonaro’s aides were using government resources for their personal gain.
Nelson Piquet helped Bolsonaro
According to Estado de Minas, Nelson Piquet helped the former president store his gifts on his family farm. Having received over 9,000 gifts during his term, there are 175 boxes of his personal collection in Piquet’s shed.
There are said to be 166 boxes with different luxury objects and the other nine with his honors. This also includes sets of Saudi jewels that the former president had been suspected of bringing into Brazil illegally.
Bolsonaro and Piquet are close friends. The F1 champion has even been reported to contribute $101,870 to re-elect his friend.
