Odebrecht was the Brazilian construction firm implicated in the Operation Car Wash scandal. The company, now known as Novonor, became one of the investigation’s central corporate subjects as prosecutors examined bribery and kickback networks connected to Petrobras.
Operation Car Wash began in 2014 as a money-laundering investigation and expanded into a vast probe of Brazil’s state-owned oil company and its contractors. Investigators alleged that construction companies colluded on contracts, inflated project prices, and routed part of the proceeds to politicians, political parties, and intermediaries.
Odebrecht’s former chief executive Marcelo Odebrecht was arrested in 2015 and sentenced in 2016 to 19 years and 4 months for paying bribes to Petrobras executives. The company later admitted to paying roughly $788 million in bribes across multiple countries. JBS, Vale, and Petrobras are all major Brazilian companies associated with other controversies, but Petrobras was the state oil company at the center of the broader Car Wash investigation, not the construction firm asked for here.