SUSPENDED Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s lawyer presented her damning indictment of the legislative coup against her on Wednesday.

Ms Rousseff called the impeachment proceedings in the Senate a “farce” motivated by her resistance to “back-room deals.”

“Everybody knows that you are judging an honest woman, a public servant dedicated to just causes,” she said in a statement read out by former attorney general Jose Eduardo Cardozo. “I’ve honoured those who voted for me.”

The Workers Party president heeded her lawyer’s advice not to appear before the Senate hearing which formally began on Tuesday.

Ms Rousseff was suspended by a vote of both houses of Congress in May over allegations she broke fiscal rules to increase public spending in the year before her 2014 re-election.

But a report last month by Senate auditors said she was innocent of the main charges.

“Never, in any democratic country, was a legitimate mandate of a president interrupted because of routine budget management acts,” the letter said.

“I don’t deny I made mistakes, and for those I surely am and will be held responsible, but I am being persecuted for what I did right.”

“What most hurts right now is the injustice,” Ms Rousseff said. “What hurts most is to perceive that I am the victim of a judicial and political farce.”

The interim government of Acting President Michel Temer — whose PMDB party has split from Ms Rousseff’s governing coalition — has been rocked by revelations of attempts to protect allies from the Car Wash corruption probe into a £9 billion bribery scandal at state oil company Petrobras.

Mr Temer himself is banned from standing for public office for eight years for breaking election law.

Ms Rousseff said she was being being targeted because she “never gave in to blackmail. I never accepted … the backroom deals so well known in the traditional politics of our country.”

Later the president told O Povo radio she did not expect the necessary two-thirds of the Senate would vote for her impeachment in August.

Brazilian police arrested 19 people on Wednesday in a £45 million corruption probe at national power firm Eletrobras.