The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expressed concern on Thursday that Brazil “may not be able to sustain the level of foreign bribery enforcement that it achieved in recent years.”
A report by the Working Group on Bribery of the so-called “club of rich countries” also says that other member states are questioning the implications of a recent decision by a Supreme Court justice to annul all evidence in a landmark corruption case.
As The Brazilian Report showed back in September, Justice Dias Toffoli annulled all evidence obtained by police and prosecutors in two computer systems owned by Odebrecht, once Brazil’s largest construction company. The company has since fallen from grace, joined a bankruptcy protection program, and changed its name to Novonor.
The U.S. Department of Justice has called the Odebrecht case the “largest foreign bribery case in history.” Back in 2016, Odebrecht and its sister petrochemical company, Braskem, pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a combined total penalty of at least USD 3.5 billion to resolve charges with authorities in the U.S., Brazil, and Switzerland arising out of their schemes to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to government officials around the world.
Odebrecht admitted in the U.S. resolution that it had paid since 2001 around USD 788 million in bribes to public officials, political parties and their representatives, or political candidates from Brazil and 11 other countries, including Angola, Argentina, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Mozambique, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.
The massive corruption scheme was uncovered by the now-defunct Operation Car Wash, a taskforce of prosecutors and Federal Police officers that started in 2014 and recovered billions of reais in stolen money and led powerful businessmen and politicians to jail...
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