Odebrecht boss arrested in corruption scandal

THE HEAD of Oderbrecht, the Brazilian company awarded the contract for building line 2 of Panama’s Metro was arrested by Brazilian police on Friday, June 18 in the latest stage of a major corruption investigation into the state-run oil company, Petrobras local media said.

Marcelo Odebrecht and Otavio Marques Azevedo, president of Andrade Gutierrez,
were arrested in an anti-corruption blitz when some 220 federal officers made eight preventive arrests, four temporary arrests, nine detentions, and 38 orders to seize documents in four Brazilian states, according to a federal police statement.
Federal police did not identify which contractors it was targeting, but Brazilian media said federal agents had arrested the presidents of both companies.
Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez, both privately held, are among Brazil’s top engineering and construction service companies. Odebrecht has won numerous contracts in Panama, including the ones for the first and second lines of the Metro.
The so-called “Lava Jato” probe, centered on Petrobras, has led to the indictment of scores of executives from Brazil’s top builders and implicated dozens of politicians, most of them from President Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, who allegedly received graft money.
It has shaken Rousseff’s government and weighed on a recession-bound Brazilian economy.