A guide to Brazil’s biggest ongoing corruption scandals

Operation Car Wash is the most famous of Brazil's corruption scandals. Photo: Fernando Frazão/ABr

Surprisingly, Brazil is never quite as high up as you might imagine on Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index. Brazil has remained far from the top of the list, coming in 79th place in 2016 and 76th in 2015. But the results of the NGO’s Latin America-specific report, released this October, had some surprises in store for Brazilians.

Although 78 percent of Brazilians believe that corruption has grown in their country over the past year, Brazil suffered from far lower levels of petty corruption than its neighbors. In nine of the twenty countries surveyed, more than 30 percent of its citizens had paid bribes to access basic services, opposed to 11 percent of Brazilians.

Nonetheless, just 35 percent of Brazilians believed that their country was doing a good job in combatting corruption – a phenomenon which Transparency International attributes to money destined for public spending being siphoned off by a collection of well-protected figures.

Nor is large-scale corruption in Brazil limited to Operation Car Wash. There’s Operation Zealots, launched in 2015 and which is still investigating tax frauds committed by some of the country’s biggest entities – including Safra, Bradesco, Santander and more. Other big investigations include Operation Unfair Play, looking into bribery scandals surrounding the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, and Operation Bullish, which examines irregularities and potential instances of fraud in interactions between development bank BNDES and meatpacker JBS. There’s also Operation Cadeia Velha, which arrested three long-standing Rio de Janeiro state lawmakers just last month.

Together, they amount to trillions of Reals in sequestered money, bribes, fines, and losses to public funds, not to mention dizzying numbers of arrests and convictions. Here’s The Brazilian Report’s breakdown of the biggest ongoing investigations.