Chief of Staff Rui Costa will present the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), a package of public investments in infrastructure, to foreign diplomats accredited to Brazil next Monday. The event will be hosted by the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Brasília.
As The Brazilian Report has shown, previous editions of the PAC left an extensive legacy of corruption and unfinished projects. The largest of these is the Petrochemical Complex (Comperj) in Rio de Janeiro. Led by government-controlled oil company Petrobras, the USD 10 billion project was abandoned about 80 percent of the way through. Unforeseen costs and engineering errors hindered its completion.
Comperj was a high-profile target of the Operation Car Wash anti-corruption investigation. Sérgio Cabral, former governor of the state of Rio, was convicted in 2017 for accepting bribes related to the construction of the complex.
That year, nine out of PAC’s ten largest projects came under investigation by Operation Car Wash, a massive anti-corruption task force. These included oil refineries, hydroelectric dams, and a railway. Major construction companies caught up in the massive scandal, like OAS and Odebrecht, fell from grace and have since changed their names.
The Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration is trying to whitewash the history of the wide-reaching anti-corruption operation. Meanwhile, chief of staff Mr. Costa recently announced plans to rehabilitate construction companies tarnished by the investigation.
The new PAC amounts to BRL 1.7 trillion (USD 349 billion) in investments, including BRL 612 billion from the private sector and a further BRL 343 billion from state-owned companies.
Earlier this year, former president Jair Bolsonaro was ruled ineligible for public office for eight years by the Superior Electoral Court. This is because the far-right ex-president convened foreign diplomats accredited to Brazil for a meeting last year, during which he presented electoral disinformation and threatened not to accept the election results.
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