BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's ruling party candidate Dilma Rousseff has come under renewed pressure to defend her wide lead in October's presidential race after a new corruption scandal surfaced at the weekend.
The leading news magazine Veja accused Rousseff's former aide and current presidential chief of staff, Erenice Guerra, of involvement in a graft scheme.
Veja said Guerra had helped obtain public works contracts for entrepreneurs in exchange for kickbacks to her son's consultancy. Guerra denied the accusations and said her bank accounts were open for the public to scrutinize, Veja said.
At the time of the alleged fraud last year, Guerra was the assistant to then chief-of-staff Rousseff, who opinion polls show is set to win the October 3 election by a landslide.
Questioned about the allegations hours before she was to appear on a live TV debate between the leading presidential candidates, Rousseff flatly denied any such scheme existed under her stewardship.
"Negative. It's not true," she said. "I won't speak on this subject. It's the business of the government, not that of my campaign," she said.
The accusations were baseless and part of a smear campaign by her main rival, Jose Serra of the opposition PSDB party, Rousseff said.
"I'm not going to talk about issues that interest my adversary's negative and slanderous agenda," said Rousseff.
The latest scandal, which featured prominently in all Brazil's major newspapers on Sunday, is certain to fuel more attacks against Rousseff by Serra, who led by 20 points in opinion polls earlier this year but now trails by that much.
For weeks, Serra has been accusing Rousseff's Workers' Party over a separate scandal involving illegal access to the tax records of his daughter and other PSDB members.
Career civil servant Rousseff has benefited enormously from the support of President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, who has become Brazil's most popular president thanks to his folksy charm and a booming economy.
(Reporting by Raymond Colitt and Peter Murphy; Additional reporting by Huge Bachega in Sao Paulo; Editing by Todd Eastham)
