Brazilian builder Andrade Gutierrez will confess to paying bribes for 2014 FIFA World Cup contracts and business with state-run companies Petrobras and Eletrobras, a newspaper report said yesterday.
Andrade Gutierrez agreed with Brazil’s prosecutor-general and other investigators to pay a fine of 1 billion reais ($270 million) in a plea deal covering the company and its executives, the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper said.
The paper did not say how it obtained the information.
Brazil’s biggest corruption investigation ever has seen some of the country’s most powerful politicians and businessmen jailed over the past two years, but shed little light so far on the soaring costs of a dozen World Cup stadiums.
Andrade Gutierrez, which declined to comment, built the Amazonia Arena in Manaus and worked on the reform of venues in Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and the capital Brasilia.
The cost of those construction projects jumped from 2.5 billion reais in early estimates to a final outlay of 3.4 billion reais, according to Contas Abertas, a group that monitors public spending.
Cost overruns and opaque decision-making in the run-up to last year’s World Cup triggered an unprecedented wave of public protests in 2013, bringing more than a million Brazilians to the streets to protest corruption and poor public services.
The protests catalysed public outrage over Brazil’s history of graft just as a team of investigators uncovered evidence of a vast price-fixing and political kickback scheme surrounding the state-run oil company known as Petro-leo Brasileiro SA.
The probe has since exposed signs of bribery on massive hydroelectric dams and a nuclear plant run by electric utility Eletrobras, or Centrais Eletrais Bra-sileiras SA, and a series of other public works, and seen the jailing of dozens of top executives and law-makers.
The federal prosecutors’ office declined to comment on the report and police did not respond to requests for comment.
Turbulent times
Brazilian football is in turmoil with football confederation (CBF) head Marco Polo Del Nero giving up his post on the FIFA Executive Committee earlier this week after months of pressure to stand down.
Del Nero, who will continue to lead his country’s football organisation, has not attended any FIFA Executive Committee meetings since May, when police raided a hotel in Switzerland and arrested nine football officials, among others, in a landmark corruption investigation into the sport’s world governing body.
Former CBF president Jose Maria Marin was one of those detained.
Del Nero returned to Brazil immediately after the raid and has not left his homeland since.