Norberto Odebrecht was founded in Brazil in 1944, and gradually expanded to become an international civil engineering giant. Then, in 2016, it signed a global leniency agreement in Brazil and pled guilty in the U.S. federal court to systemic bribery committed between 2001-16 and paid billions in criminal fines. In 2006, Odebrecht had institutionalized their bribing operations by running them through a new Division of Structured Operations. During the years investigated, Odebrecht had paid around $788 million in verified bribes to secure more than 100 large-scale projects across 12 countries, including the 2016 Olympic Games projects in Brazil, pipelines, and transit.
A year after Odebrecht pled guilty, in 2017, a civil lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York by claiming to be securities defrauded investor Washington State Investment Board (WSIB) over its $100 million loss in bonds. It faced an obstacle in 2020, when Judge Paul G. Gardephe dismissed a part of WSIB’s initial complaint because WSIB had not provided details on which financial statements were distorted by bribe amounts. In 2021, a second major civil lawsuit that had been brought by investor DoubleLine was obstructed by the granting of an order shielding Odebrecht’s communications from private investigators, seemingly to protect active foreign investigations. Then, in a 2023, amended complaint, WSIB fixed the glitch that previously derailed them by linking $280 million in bribes to specific distorted corporate assets: this finally convinced Judge Gardephe to lift his discovery stay and to allow WSIB to demand corporate records. Then, WSIB attempted to ask for a summary judgement based on the criminal finding of fraud, but Magistrate Judge Barbara Moses rejected this idea and asked them to litigate the case anew civilly. While the court had allowed litigants to begin asking for discovery years earlier, Odebrecht had not been complying with these requests, and in September 2026, it attempted to formally block all discovery by claiming Brazil’s Supreme Court had dismissed their leniency agreement due to prosecutorial misconduct.
In the latest development in WSIB v. Odebrecht S.A., Judge Moses ruled against Odebrecht, arguing Brazilian squabbles cannot be employed to prevent American civil discovery. The court is now deciding if the parties will proceed by Odebrecht actually opening themselves to discovery scrutiny, or if they will begin settlement negotiations.
It has been a decade since Odebrecht confessed and opened their files to Brazilian prosecutors, and yet after a decade of attempts from investors to be compensated they have not been able to begin a case because the “details” of how Odebrecht was defrauding them is hidden in he files Odebrecht is refusing to turn over. Without access to the evidence, the prosecutors cannot prove the thing they know the evidence would logically state, based on what the criminal pleading indicates.
Only now is the U.S. court even beginning to rule on the irrationality of Odebrecht’s objections: Brazilian law cannot bar them from disclosing the facts of their briberies. Their leniency agreement was designed to protect the criminal Brazilian investigators, not the books that prove the corruption of executives, operators or investors of Odebrecht. The change that prompted this sudden renewal of litigation activities is that the Brazilian Operation Carwash has concluded back in 2021 (after 278 convictions and the recovery of $800 million), and these investigators have made public the facts in the accounts recording the briberies, and their depositions about them (released back in 2017). Thus, records are now public, even if Odebrecht continues refusing to surrender these records. The reason for a decade-long stall is partially clarified by the finding of illegal collusion between Chief Judge Sergio Moro and the prosecutors in Operation Carwash in Brazil, which have led to the Brazilian Supreme Court’s annulling of most of this operations convictions and fines due to misconduct. These absurdly stumbling trials are themselves evidence of Odebrecht’s ongoing successes at corrupting the criminal and civil judicial processes. Odebrecht is still an active company, with annual revenues that have dropped to around a billion from a peak of $30 billion pre-scandal. It is the vulture investors who anticipated Odebrecht’s “sudden” or artificially orchestrated legal collapse in 2016 who made a lot of money, and it might be their accounts that Odebrecht has been fighting to protect from implication. They also made a windfall when the Supreme Court refunded Odebrecht’s apparently temporary corruption fines.
This case proves that following-the-money is not possible without hacks when the sued party corrupts the system into blocking the legal opening of their books. And in such cases of billions-worth-in-corruption, there are no good guys. Even the 2019 Intercept uncovering of messages between Carwash prosecutors and Judge Moro showing a coordination of strategies served to reverse the criminal findings, instead of bringing new charges against the exposed judge and prosecutors. Perhaps, anti-corruption investigations are doomed to be corrupted? Who can resist bribes with billions on-offer? Across the decades the bribery and the failed lawsuits have been happening the Workers’ Party has been mostly in charge. Luiz da Silva, who just won a fourth term in October 2026, was the president between 2003-10, followed by Workers’ Party’s Dilma Rousseff (2011-6), before Rousseff was impeached and removed from office. Operation Carwash’s prosecutors had argued that the Workers’ Party was running the pay-to-play ring that Odebrecht was merely a player in. There was a claim that Lula secretly owned a house that Odebrecht and another construction company had spent over $200,000 remodeling, among other “gifts”. These accusations convinced Judge Moro to convict Lula of corruption and money laundering, for which he spent 580 days in federal prison. The 2019 Intercept leak found evidence against Judge Moro and annulled Lula’s conviction. This is why Lula could run for office yet again, and has just won. And Lula has been crushing his opponents through the courts, including convicting Jair Bolsonaro of attempting a coup d’etat for plotting a violent overthrow to overturn his failed 2022 election run. And immediately after Senator Flavio Bolsonaro lost the most recent 2026 election Lula targeted him with multiple criminal investigations over money laundering (via links to a sports-betting corporation), raising money from a financier for a film about his father, and securing campaign financing from U.S. conservative donors. And now Flavio has illegally (despite his passport being seized in Brazil) escaped into the U.S., where he has been granted visas by Trump. There are no good guys in this story, but it is a dramatic and captivating saga.
