Investigations

Odebrecht Paid $788 Million in Bribes to Win Contracts Across Latin America. When It Came Time to Pay Its Own Fine, It Said It Couldn't Afford To.

In December 2016, the Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht admitted, under oath, to something no company had ever formally confessed to before: it had operated an internal department whose sole function was paying bribes. The unit had a name — the Division of Structured Operations — an org chart, a dedicated budget, encrypted communications software, and a staff that referred to hundreds of illicit-payment recipients by code names like "Gigo," "Bambi," and "Waterloo." Between 2001 and 2016, it moved roughly $788 million to public officials in twelve countries, in exchange for contracts worth billions more.

Odebrecht was, by then, Latin America's largest engineering and construction company, founded in 1944 in Salvador, Bahia, and grown into an operation that built highways, dams, subway systems, and the renovated Miami International Airport. Its bribery machine surfaced almost by accident: Brazilian federal police investigating money laundering run through a Brasília gas station car wash in 2014 followed the trail up through the state oil company Petrobras and, eventually, into Odebrecht's own books. The investigation kept the car wash's name — Operação Lava Jato, Operation Car Wash — long after the actual car wash stopped being relevant to anything.

A Department Whose Only Product Was Corruption

The Division of Structured Operations was formalized in 2006 and, until 2009, reported directly to the highest levels of the company. Announcing the U.S. guilty plea in December 2016, then–Deputy Assistant Attorney General Sung-Hee Suh described it plainly: "Odebrecht and Braskem used a hidden but fully functioning Odebrecht business unit — a 'Department of Bribery,' so to speak — that systematically paid hundreds of millions of dollars to corrupt government officials in countries on three continents."

The division ran on two purpose-built tools. MyWebDay processed bribe payment requests and generated spreadsheets tracking the illicit shadow budget; Drousys, its companion system, let staff exchange encrypted emails and instant messages with financial operators and the officials receiving the money, all under code names. Payments were routed through as many as four layers of offshore accounts before reaching a recipient. According to court filings, once investigators were closing in, in January 2016 Odebrecht employees destroyed the physical encryption keys needed to open MyWebDay altogether.

The division functioned, in the DOJ's language, "effectively" as its own bribe department — a description the company acknowledged as "true and accurate" in its plea agreement.
Drousys communications, later leaked, contained more than 13,000 documents — spreadsheets, offshore statements, emails, and transaction records — that fed subsequent journalism on the scandal.
Some of the code names embedded in the system were still uncracked by investigators years after the plea deal.

Twelve Countries, $788 Million, One Company

The bribes went to officials in Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Mozambique, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, buying Odebrecht more than $3.3 billion in contracts across upwards of 100 projects. Angola and Mozambique were the only markets outside the Americas; the company admitted to paying roughly $50 million in bribes in Angola alone.

In Colombia, Odebrecht bribes tied to the Ruta del Sol highway project alone ran in the tens of millions of dollars. In Panama, money traced to Odebrecht became part of a separate U.S. money-laundering and extradition case against relatives of former president Ricardo Martinelli. The company's own statement of facts, filed with the U.S. Justice Department, is the closest thing that exists to a single ledger of a bribery operation run across an entire continent.

The Presidents Club

Peru absorbed the heaviest political toll. Former president Alejandro Toledo was later sentenced to more than 20 years in prison after accepting roughly $35 million in Odebrecht bribes tied to a highway concession. Fellow former presidents Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski were investigated and prosecuted over Odebrecht-linked payments; sitting president Martín Vizcarra was also drawn into the investigation. In April 2019, two-time president Alan García shot himself as police arrived to arrest him in connection with the case.

In Brazil, the investigation reached the country's most prominent politician: former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was convicted twice on charges tied to the broader Car Wash probe, imprisoned, and barred from running in the 2018 presidential election. In March 2021, Brazil's Supreme Court annulled those convictions, ruling that the presiding judge, Sergio Moro, had been biased — Moro had by then served as justice minister in the government of the president who won the election Lula was blocked from entering.

Elsewhere, Ecuador's vice president Jorge Glas was jailed over Odebrecht-linked corruption, and El Salvador's former president Mauricio Funes was investigated over alleged illicit enrichment connected in part to the scandal before fleeing to Nicaragua, which granted him citizenship and refused to extradite him. Politicians in Guatemala and Colombia were indicted as well.

The Record Fine Nobody Actually Paid

On December 21, 2016, Odebrecht and its petrochemical affiliate Braskem pleaded guilty to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations in the U.S. and to parallel charges in Brazil and Switzerland, agreeing to what the Justice Department called the largest foreign bribery resolution in history: at least $3.5 billion in combined penalties.

Odebrecht then told the three governments it could not actually pay that much. Under an "inability to pay" analysis built into the settlement, the company's obligation was reduced to roughly $2.6 billion, split among the three countries: about $93 million to the United States, $116 million to Switzerland, and the remainder — the bulk of it — to Brazil. The firm that had found $788 million to distribute to public officials over fifteen years told prosecutors, with their agreement, that it did not have the money to cover its own fine.

The Boss Who Turned in Everyone

Marcelo Odebrecht, grandson of the company's founder and its CEO throughout the bribery scheme, was sentenced by Judge Sergio Moro in March 2016 to 19 years and four months in prison for corruption, money laundering, and participation in a criminal organization. He then negotiated a leniency deal, agreeing to testify in detail about the bribery machine in exchange for a reduced sentence — first cut to 10 years, later reduced again by Brazil's Supreme Court.

He was released from prison to house arrest in December 2017 after roughly two and a half years behind bars. Marcelo Odebrecht was one of 77 company executives who struck individual leniency deals as part of the case, turning what had been a closed internal bribery division into one of the most detailed corporate confessions in the history of white-collar prosecution.

The Company That Changed Its Name and Kept Building

By 2019, the company's finances had caught up with its legal exposure. Odebrecht filed for bankruptcy protection in Brazil that June to restructure more than $13 billion in debt, after missing debt payments and watching two subsidiary sales collapse. Its workforce had shrunk from roughly 180,000 employees five years earlier to about 48,000; annual revenue fell from a 2014 peak of $45.8 billion to under $25 billion by 2017.

On December 18, 2020, the company announced it was changing its name to Novonor. The name changed; the ownership did not. Novonor's controlling shareholder remains a member of the Odebrecht family, under a new governance rule that bars family members specifically from holding the chief executive title.

Novonor now describes itself, in its own materials, as a holding company "inspired by the future." Its predecessor's Division of Structured Operations is gone, along with the encryption keys its own employees destroyed to keep investigators out of it.

Filed from public reporting:

Odebrecht Paid $788 Million in Bribes to Win Contracts Across Latin America. When It Came Time to Pay Its Own Fine, It Said It Couldn't Afford To.

A Department Whose Only Product Was Corruption

Twelve Countries, $788 Million, One Company

The Presidents Club

The Record Fine Nobody Actually Paid

The Boss Who Turned in Everyone

The Company That Changed Its Name and Kept Building

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