Anti-Mafia investigation of Martinelli and Odebrecht contract

THE ITALIAN ANTI-MAFIA prosecutor has opened a case against the Odebrecht Construction company for alleged acts of corruption in the construction of Line 1 of the Panama Metro say Brazilian media reports, now in the hands of Panama’s Public Prosecutor, Kenia Porcell.

 According to the Estado Brasil, this particular case would be part of a grand scheme of corruption created by former President Ricardo Martinelli.
 Details of the investigation are secret for now, because it is an anti-mafia operation unit.
However, the publication noted, Brazilian justice was already involved in the case because, it has collaborated in trying to clarify how the scheme devised by Martinelli, worked.
 According to the head of the International Cooperation Department of the Brazilian Public Ministry, Vladimir Aras, “Brazil is already answering the requests for cooperation made by Panama in that case.”
Italian justice had its starting point in this research through wiretapping the company Impregilo, which competed and lost in the bidding for Line 1 of the Panama Metro in 2010 .
Prosecutors suspect Estado says that the contract closed with the payment of bribes to through the Italian Valter Lavítola. A Italian prosecutors said it seemed odd that Odebrecht would beat Impregilo, although the bid was $50 million lower than Odebrecht, a fact that could be explained as the technical bid was granted greater weight than the financial offer (65% vs. 45%).
However the attention of the Italian prosecutors was drawn to the fact that between 2010 and 2013 there were three addenda to the contract-for a total of about $620 lion were bringing the final cost of the work, from $1.447 billion to more than $2 billion. 
The deputy prosecutor of the Court of Naples, Vincenzo Piscitelli, does not believe the project Odebrecht was better than that of Impregilo. “Martinelli chose the Brazilian company Who knows what he achieved with that,” Piscitelli said at a court hearing in November 2014.
Piscitelli said at the time that Lavítola “ran a corrupting channel in Brazil” and was the mediator of the interests of Odebrecht in Panama.