Odebrecht settlement spurs bribery inquiries across Latin America

[QUITO, Ecuador] Politicians and investigators across Latin America demanded more information from Brazil-based construction giant Odebrecht on Thursday after it admitted to a decade of immense bribe payments in the region.

In agreeing on Wednesday to pay at least US$3.5 billion to Brazilian, US and Swiss prosecutors, the largest penalty ever in a foreign bribery case, Odebrecht admitted to paying officials to help secure lucrative construction contracts in 12 countries, potentially opening itself up to new prosecution.

Nearly 80 Odebrecht executives and employees have also agreed to turn state's witness as part of a leniency deal, and their testimony is expected to provide even more evidence about corruption in several nations.

Peru's president and a Venezuelan opposition leader said Odebrecht should explain the payments in their countries, while Ecuador opened an investigation and Colombia's government asked the attorney general's office to move forward with one.

"Prosecutors will have to bring people from Odebrecht here so that they explain who they paid this money to," Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski told reporters, referring to the US$29 million Odebrecht said it paid officials in the Andean nation between about 2005 and 2014, spanning three presidencies.

Guilty pleas on Wednesday from Odebrecht and Braskem SA , the petrochemical company it jointly owns with Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras, were the first in the United States following a nearly three-year investigation in Brazil.

Odebrecht and Braskem were charged with conspiring to violate the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which is aimed at deterring companies from bribing officials overseas.

Odebrecht said it paid US$439 million outside of Brazil, with the largest bribe admissions abroad in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Panama. Brazilian prosecutors have singled out Panama for not cooperating with their investigation.

Panama's presidency said on Thursday it supported an investigation by local prosecutors that would "punish the companies and persons involved in these acts."

Panama's national prosecutors' office said it was requesting information on the investigation from the United States.

The discovery of kickbacks to Brazilian politicians off contracts between state-run companies, mainly Petrobras, and engineering conglomerates like Odebrecht, has generated political upheaval and led to 80 convictions in Brazil. More than 50 politicians there are under investigation.

Family-run Odebrecht blossomed during an economic boom in Brazil under former Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff and its executives regularly rubbed shoulders with elites across Latin America.

It became the region's largest engineering conglomerate, building parts of a road across the Amazon jungle, tunnels and subways in major cities.

Brazilian prosecutors say they are certain Odebrecht's way of doing business in Brazil, where the company is accused of paying out US$2 billion in bribes in the past 15 years, was the way it operated around the globe.

Argentina and Peru had already opened investigations into Odebrecht construction contracts for suspected kickbacks to former politicians.

Prosecutors in Peru recently returned from an investigative trip to Switzerland, which has turned over information on about 1,000 bank accounts to Brazilian authorities on suspicion they are linked to the country's wide-ranging corruption scandal.

Brazilian police say Odebrecht may have paid bribes to former Peruvian President Ollanta Humala as well as Argentine officials, including a former transportation secretary.

Mr Humala denies wrongdoing. Mr Kuczynski, who was not named in the Brazilian investigation but was prime minister or finance minister when Odebrecht agreed to bribe a high-ranking official in 2005, said on Thursday he was not involved in any corrupt scheme.

Ecuador's attorney general, Galo Chiriboga, said on Thursday he had requested information from Brazil and the US Justice Department. "We will find out who Odebrecht bribed," he told state-run media.

The head of Guatemala's special anti-corruption prosecutor's office told Reuters he had already been investigating Odebrecht bribes to a government official, and President Jimmy Morales said the government would revise all Odebrecht contracts.

Experts on corporate bribery said the Odebrecht admissions in a dozen countries - which also include Angola and Mexico - could subject Odebrecht to new investigations. "It is possible that those countries could pursue their own actions, said Peter Spivack, a Washington-based corporate lawyer and expert on the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

He said many of the countries named do not have corporate criminal liability laws, or like Argentina, have newly introduced laws, meaning penalties would be a lesser civil sanction or public procurement bars.

The Argentine prosecutor in charge of the Odebrecht investigation, Sergio Rodriguez, said the plea deal on Wednesday would have a direct impact on their case, which is looking at four Odebrecht projects, and he was trying to reach Brazilian prosecutors to find out more.

"We have a preliminary case open," Mr Rodriguez told Reuters."We will need to incorporate the information from the agreement sooner or later." Sources close to Odebrecht and Brazil's federal prosecutors say it was mostly the work of the Brazilian investigators that led to the Odebrecht's record-setting corruption settlement.

But if the settlement, which was negotiated in Brasilia, had been announced in Brazil, its legal system would have required that details remain sealed and not disclosed to the public, two sources close to the negotiation told Reuters on Thursday.

The hope among Brazilian officials is that by having the plea agreements with Odebrecht and Braskem made public, authorities in the other countries will now come under public pressure to follow up and investigate.

"The corruption we've uncovered in Brazil was systematic and complex, and Odebrecht's central role in it is now obvious," Brazilian federal prosecutor Carlos Lima said earlier this year. "We've found that wherever Odebrecht has worked, there has been this pattern of corruption, and we're carefully collaborating with several other countries on this."

REUTERS