The Mercantile Court in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has rejected an appeal by the Dominican Republic that asked for the country to be included among the creditors of the Odebrecht company. The Brazilian construction company has said that it will withhold its payment of the debt on the US$184 million that it had promised to pay the DR back in 2017, as the bribery scandal broke out across much of Latin America.
Odebrecht has admitted to providing US$92 million to Dominican businessman Luis Rondon to secure a series of highly overpriced contracts for infrastructure development.
Of the payments due on the US$184 million, Odebrecht has only made two, in 2017 and 2018. When the company was undergoing its restructuring—it is now called Novonor—it stopped payments. Dominican efforts to obtain the remaining US$124 million have been unsuccessful, and this decision is certainly not helpful.
After the agreement was reached with Odebrecht, investigators in Ecuador found tens of thousands of pages of data in Odebrecht computers in Quito that referred quite plainly to at least another US$35 million that was funneled into the Dominican Republic in would-be bribes.
This money has yet to be traced by the new local prosecution authorities, but the on-going cases of anti-corruption that involve the family and friends of the former president Danilo Medina, as well as his predecessor, Leonel Fernandez might produce some light on all this.
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Diario Libre
20 September 2021