Insider’s Account of How Graft Fed Brazil’s Political Crisis
The senator’s accounts of colossal bribes, back-room oil deals and desperate cover-ups — pieced together from interviews, leaked intercepts of telephone conversations and court filings — offer a rare glimpse into how a leftist party that rose to power vowing to stamp out the corruption of a privileged political elite ended up embracing its predecessors’ practices. His testimony has accelerated Brazil’s political crisis, in which fearful rulers are masterminding power grabs, secretly recording each other and preparing for the day that they, too, might find themselves on the wrong side of an early-morning police raid.
.. prosecutors discovered a scheme inside the national oil company, Petrobras: Contractors had paid nearly $3 billion in bribes to executives who in turn channeled money into the campaigns of parties in Brazil’s governing coalition.