Executives of Brazil's biggest construction companied along with another former director of State-operated Petrobas oil were arrested by Federal police on Friday, Nov. 14 over Brazil's biggest political kickback scandal.
Executives from Brazil's biggest construction companies were accused of using money from publicly owned Petrobas oil to fund their political campaigns.
Renato Duque, Petrobas' former director of services was detained Friday after devising the kickback scheme and conniving with other Brazilian executives.
Petrobas is Brazil's biggest company and oversees tapping big offshore oil fields and generating funds that will be used to boost the country to developed world status.
However, the company had a heavy debt burden and hasn't met development goals.
Because of the incident, investigations, called "Operation Car Wash" on some of Brazil's biggest private construction companies, enterprises that are consistently among the top donors to political campaigns were being scrutinized by authorities.
Now, police are directly targeting them for allegedly making illegal kickbacks worth exponentially more than the legal campaign contributions. The case fuels widespread belief among Brazilians that their political system is rife with corruption, especially when it comes to big infrastructure works and state-controlled companies.
Back in 2013, millions of Brazilians protested against the government's corrupt practices and siphoning off funds from much needed public services.
Police arrested and took boxes of documents and froze bank accounts of top executives during the raids on the offices of industrial engineering firm UTC and Iesa Oil and Gas and builders OAS and Queiroz Galvao.
An arrest warrant also was issued for the top executive of builder Camargo Correa. Aside from that, authorities also conducted a raid in the office of Brazil's biggets builder, Odebredcht, and Engevix and Mendes Junior.
Alberto Youssef, a convicted black-market money launderer, told the authorities that he knew about the Petrobas kickback scheme and how Brazilian executives benefited from it.
Youssef is spilling the beans in order to receive a lighter sentence. He claims that recently elected President Dilma Rousseff and former President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva were also knowledgeable about the kickbacks.
