In the hearing regarding the US$92 million Odebrecht construction company bribes case, former Odebrecht general manager in the Dominican Republic, Marcelo Hofke reaffirmed the payment of US$92 million through an offshore company belonging to Ángel Rondón and lawyer Conrado Pittaluga. Hofke said that he is aware of the bribe payments through company information and conversations with other Odebrecht former executives.
He specified that, according to the information admitted by Odebrecht, these companies were Lashan and Conansa from Rondón and Newport from Pittaluga, which received payments for public officials to secure the construction contracts.
Hokfe spoke in Spanish and said that both Rondón and Pittaluga were intermediaries for public officials’ payment, according to what the company has already admitted. Another company officer, Mauricio Dantes Bezerra had previously testified along these lines, while speaking in Portuguese, and requiring a legal interpreter.
Hofke said that the payments were made by the company’s structured operations division that made the transactions outside the normal accounting to pay bribes and private payments. When interrogated in 2017, Hofke had said he was not aware of the bribes and that the commercial representative Angel Rondón was being paid for his services.
Hofke clarified that when asked about the case in 2017, he was not aware of the illicit payments or that Rondón was an intermediary. He said Rondón was introduced to him as a commercial representative by his predecessor at the company, Marcos Cruz. Hofke testified that, by then, Cruz was negotiating a collaboration agreement and was under secrecy, that is, he could not disclose the information because it was confidential.
He assured that after the US$184 million penalty agreement between Odebrecht and the Dominican authorities was signed and the agreed documentation was sent here, he became aware, indirectly, that Rondón was an intermediary for the illicit payments for the awarding of construction projects.
El Caribe reports that Rodrigo Maluf Cardoso, another Brazilian witness, did not establish that Aragon Consulting, a Pittaluga company, had received illegal payments from Odebrecht. The witness did not identify Pittaluga’s company when, in the cross-examination, the defense showed him a document containing a table of payments made by Odebrecht to companies, including one similar to the defendant’s, whose lawyers said that the Public Prosecutor’s Office attributed false operations.
Read more in Spanish:
El Caribe
Listin Diario
Hoy
15 January 2021