A Brazilian multinational firm and its petrochemical division will pay $3.5 billion to resolve U.S. and international charges that they bribed government officials around the world and arranged illicit payments to bankers to help facilitate the scheme. In a pair of plea agreements, U.S. officials said that Odebrecht S.A., a Brazilian holding company that conducts business in 28 countries, set up a secret "Division of Structured Operations" that managed and administered a "shadow budget" of unrecorded funds used to pay hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes to officials on three continents over a 15-year period. The unit, which U.S....
A series of public graft scandals from Uzbekistan to Argentina are alike in having landed dozens of domestic officials, business executives and other suspects in jail in countries already perceived as vulnerable to grand corruption.
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