Panama looms large in Brazil bribery revelations
THE ODEBRECHT group, involved in the gigantic corruption plot uncovered at Petrobras, paid $3.37 billion in bribes between 2006 and 2014, including Panama according to a statement to Justice officials by ex director Hilberto Mascarenhas, which was released this week.
The figure, appears in a table, including Panama, delivered by Mascarenhas to the prosecutors of the Lava Jato operation, who for more than three years have been investigating the multi-millions of deviations that occurred within the state oil company.
Odebrecht, the largest construction company in Brazil, and the biggest single contractor hired by successive Panama adminstrations, spent $1.4 billion on bribes between 2012 and 2013, while in 2014, when the police unveiled the network of corruption, it fell to $450 million.
Mascarenhas, in charge of the notorious Department of Structured Operations, from which all the bribes were distributed and recorded, revealed in his testimony that he alerted the company’s former president, Marcelo Odebrecht, to the worrying increase in the amount destined for that illicit purpose.
“Since 2009 I alerted Marcelo (Odebrecht) that the volume of resources was growing brutally,” Mascarenhas recalled in his statement in the framework of a collaboration agreement with Justice, which also involved 76 other ex- directors of the company.
2009-2014 were the years of the Martinelli administration in Panama when Odebrecht got multi millions for building the Metro, and Cinta Costera 2 and 3.
The policy of bribes, which went from 60 million dollars destined in 2006 and grew progressively to the 730 million dollars of 2012 and 2013, got to be described by Mascarenhas as “suicide”.
“Financial suicide, suicide risk, suicide of security, suicide of everything,” he said.
According to the investigations, there were workers inside Odebrecht dedicated exclusively to processing the payment of bribes to politicians, among other authorities, who were directly authorized by the heads of the company.
Panama paradise
According to Marcarenhas, the department made payments in two ways: in Brazil they were made in kind or by means of “packages / suitcase of money in predetermined places”, while bank transfers abroad were made in unreported accounts located in financial paradises like Panama.
The testimony of 77 former Odebrecht ex-officials, who were under secrecy, was released a day after the Supreme Court announced on April 11 that it authorized the opening of 76 investigations against almost one hundred privileged politicians cited in the indictments .
In the list of suspects, there are eight executive ministers of President Michel Temer and 12 of the country’s 27 governors, as well as the five former Brazilian presidents: José Sarney (1985-1990), Fernando Collor de Mello (1990-1992), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016).
Campaign financing
The stories reveal the illegal financing of campaigns, “favors” in money to “repay” the obtaining of public works or the approval of laws that favored the businesses of the company.
However, the payment of bribes was not limited to Brazil and expanded from to a dozen countries in Latin America – including Brazil – and Africa, according to documents published last December by the United States Department of Justice.
The scandal has reached important figures in the political landscape of the region, as there is an arrest warrant against Peruvian ex-president Alejandro Toledo, declared a fugitive, and sprinkled with the Peruvian ex-president Ollanta Humala and the current rulers of Panama, Juan Carlos Varela, and Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, among others.
In addition to apologizing publicly, Odebrecht announced last December the signing of agreements for which it pledged to pay fines of 6,959.4 million reais (about $ 2.2 billion) to the governments of the United States, Brazil and Switzerland to offset the Illegal acts for which you are being investigated
