The Odebrecht scandal: plot thickens as father and son killed

 

The death of Jorge Enrique Pizano (56)  who was an auditor at Corficolombiana, at a country house outside Bogota, leaving audio recordings and a TV interview  to Canal Uno exposing the biggest Latin American corruption scandal. Three days later his son Alejandro Pizano Ponce de Leon flew to Columbia  from Spain for his father’s funeral and dies of cyanide poisoning in the same house after drinking water from a bottled left on his father’s desk. Corficolombiana is owned by New York-listed Grupo Aval, a banking conglomerate headed by Columbia’s richest man Luis Carlos Sarmiento. Pizano was suffering from cancer but died of a heart attack unrelated to the illness. In 2015, a year before the Odebrecht scandal broke, Pizano told Corficolombiana’s then lawyer Mr Martinez, about contract irregularities at the company, but nothing was done about it.

A month ago Amparo Ceron the prosecutor investigating the corruption case has a serious car crash and rushed to hospital and spends two weeks in an induced comma while on holiday in Chile.

The Odebrecht scandal which erupted in 2016 as an offshoot of Brazil’s wider Lava Jato (Car Wash) corruption case that engulfed the presidents, politicians and business leaders. The construction giant admitted paying nearly $800m in bribes to win infrastructure contracts across the Americas.  Eventually Marco Odebrecht the company’s CEO was jailed.

In Peru Presidnet Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned in March 2018, over his links to the company and even former Peruvian presidents have become involved. Opposition leader Keiko Pujimori was arrested for allegedly taking over $1m in illegal funding from Odebrecht, which she denies.

In more than 10 countries a corruption wen is being untangled and top politicians are suspected.

Emilio Odebrecht,chairman of the Brazilian conglomerate appeared last December before the prosecutors of Operation Carwash ( Lava Jato) which has been tracking corruption for three years. Odebrecht and 76 other executives and employees of the Odebrecht group, past and present wsere charged with bribery over many years to secure contracts for Brazil’s largest construction projects, including some commissioned by the oil company Petrobras.