Bribery Division: Odebrecht's secret files

The story of how the files arrived was also told. In January 2019 Boscán wrote to reporter Sasha Chavkin of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and the ICIJ later published a behind-the-scenes piece with his account. Peru's El Comercio reconstructed the handoff: a hotel in Quito, the documents under a Bible. More than 50 journalists from 10 countries in Latin America and the United States worked through the 13,000 documents. The Mil Hojas website obtained the same information separately, as La Posta acknowledged in its opening video.

Odebrecht did not pay bribes casually. It had an office for that, the Structured Operations Division, and an encrypted computer system to keep the books on its dirty payments: Drousys. When the Lava Jato scandal caught up with it, the company signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in December 2016, confessing to 788 million dollars in bribes in twelve countries. For Ecuador it admitted 33.5 million for five projects between 2007 and 2016. In exchange for that cooperation, its executives received judicial benefits. Of the 77 executives who turned informant in various justice systems, none mentioned the Quito Metro; neither did José Conceição Santos, whose testimony sent Vice President Glas to prison.

A source told Andersson Boscán, then 27 and the recent co-founder of La Posta with Luis Eduardo Vivanco, that the confession was incomplete. It took him six months to persuade the source to hand over what they had. The handoff took place in a hotel room in Quito: an external drive under a Bible, on the nightstand. Inside were 33,000 Drousys files. The material overwhelmed them. In January 2019 Boscán emailed Sasha Chavkin of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with a two-word subject line: Important investigation.

The ICIJ sent Chavkin to Quito to verify and copy the files. Once cleaned up, more than 13,000 valid documents remained: spreadsheets, account statements, emails and transaction records between operators with code names such as Bambi, Stalin or Robocop. The Consortium assembled a team of more than 50 journalists from 10 countries and 18 media outlets. In Ecuador, La Posta worked with El Universo, and Mónica Velásquez was part of the team: it was her first collaboration with the ICIJ. Publication was simultaneous on June 25, 2019, at 11 p.m. Eastern time.

For Ecuador the finding was straightforward. The bribes added up to 51 million, not 33.5, and covered seven projects, not five: the Refinería del Pacífico, Daule Vinces, the Pascuales Cuenca pipeline, the La Esperanza aqueduct, the Manduriacu dam, and two more that had never been part of any investigation or had come out of them clean: the Quito Metro and the Ruta Viva. Odebrecht had denied paying bribes on those two projects. Drousys usage logs show that in mid-2016 someone deleted everything related to them, before the company sat down to cooperate with the courts. According to the criminal lawyers La Posta consulted, that deletion put at risk the executives' benefits and even Odebrecht's agreement with the U.S. justice system.

The Quito Metro was the largest project Odebrecht won in the country. Mayor Augusto Barrera announced the project, commissioned the studies in September 2010, created the public company in 2012 and said in 2013 that it would cost 1.492 billion. Drousys shows that the construction company had been planning the bribe since 2013, two years before the payment: in November of that year it signed a subcontract with a Spanish company to prepare the money trail. The Acciona Odebrecht consortium won the tender under Mayor Mauricio Rodas, who signed the contract on November 26, 2015, for 2.009 billion, when Lava Jato had already broken: the rules required the contract to go to the cheapest bid, and the cheapest was Odebrecht. That was 517 million more than the studies. Drousys records payments of five million dollars: three for the bid and two as a success fee. That is one percent of those 517 million, the company's usual percentage. An email exchange from July 2015 between the company's finance officer and his assistant, using aliases, pins down the account: the money came from Fortress Investor Limited at Meinl Bank in Austria, a bank Odebrecht controlled. The final beneficiary is not recorded.

The Ruta Viva, the highway connecting Quito with the valleys and the airport, had not even been under scrutiny. The Bribery Division's spreadsheets record, in October 2012, a payment of 915,250 dollars linked to a contract between an Odebrecht company in the Cayman Islands and Brazil's Tucson Engenharia, a partner under investigation in Brazil, and in 2013 another 573,000 and 600,000 disguised in a subcontract. More than two million in all. Barrera distanced himself in an interview: the call for bids and the tender documents were prepared with CAF, he said, the settlements for both phases took place under the Rodas administration, and he never in his life had anything to do with those people. On the Metro, Rodas replied in writing from abroad that the process began under the previous administration and that the consortiums were prequalified in 2013; Barrera answered that Odebrecht lost phase 1, that he suspended phase 2 without opening the bids, and that the project was contracted 500 million above the studies. Odebrecht, Acciona and former Public Works manager Germánico Pinto did not respond. Prosecutor Thania Moreno, who was handling the preliminary inquiry into the Metro, asked for it to be shelved hours before SUMA, Rodas's party, delivered to Lenín Moreno's government the votes to elect María Alejandra Vicuña as vice president, in January 2018; the closure was made official on February 27, according to the press. Asked about it, she said she needed authorization from her superiors to explain why.

The second installment described a mechanism no one had reported, which Odebrecht called "funding": how it moved bribe money into the banking system using insurance. On October 23, 2014, the insurer Ecuatoriano Suiza, one of the country's fifteen largest and owned by José Suárez, billed Odebrecht for an excess policy covering the Pascuales Cuenca pipeline for 300 million dollars, valid from 2014 to 2016 and signed by all three parties. More than half a dozen insurance industry experts reviewed it for La Posta. The premium: 1.619 million. Because no Ecuadorian insurer can cover that amount, the risk is ceded to international reinsurers. Normally it is spread among several. Ecuatoriano Suiza ceded almost all of it, 99.99 percent, to a single reinsurer: Ocean Re, a Panamanian company with less than four million in capital, authorized in Ecuador in 2014 and not authorized afterward.

Ocean Re in turn ceded the risk again, once more 99.99 percent, to Nashville Financial Corp, a Panamanian firm that is not registered in Ecuador and is not part of the insurance market. It was a front company of Odebrecht's own. The construction company ended up insuring itself and, in the process, moving a million and a half dollars with legal and banking cover to Nashville, which fed the swarm of offshore companies used to pay the bribes. The Credicorp Bank transfers show it. That is the same amount Drousys records as bribes for the pipeline that year. The operation was repeated at least six times. If a project fell through, documents called releases freed the insurer from paying. The six insured projects included Daule Vinces. Ecuatoriano Suiza's lawyer did not rule out that his client had acted illegally: the policies were issued in bulk, at Odebrecht's request, with the reinsurer the construction company brought along. The company's insurance broker distanced itself.

The third installment returned to a familiar name. Pedro Merizalde, head of Petroecuador and a minister under Rafael Correa, had appeared in the 2016 Panama Papers as the owner of the offshore company Yorkfield Investment. He admitted then that he had failed to declare a company that, he said, never operated; Correa defended him: he hasn't made a deal for twenty cents. Drousys shows 320,000 dollars that went straight into Yorkfield's account at the Royal Bank of Canada during 2013 from Field Services Limited, at Meinl Bank in Antigua, and from Columbia Management, another company in the scheme. In 2013 Merizalde was head of Petroecuador and an authorized signatory for the Refinería del Pacífico, one of the seven projects with bribes. The courts could have discovered it in 2016, had Galo Chiriboga's Attorney General's Office traced the account. Merizalde was a fugitive when the story was published.

The effect was swift and short-lived. On July 4, 2019, the Attorney General's Office asked the Provincial Court of Pichincha to reopen the Quito Metro case. On July 11, the attorney general, Solicitor General Íñigo Salvador, the comptroller and anti-corruption secretary Iván Granda sat down for the first time with Odebrecht's new leadership to discuss full reparations; the second meeting was with the Water Secretariat. The Quito municipality, the only direct contracting party for the Metro and the Ruta Viva, asked to join the talks; the Metro's general manager, Jorge Yáñez, resigned. In August the company's representative, Félix Martins, gave his first interview in Ecuador, on Café La Posta: he apologized to Ecuadorians, said that all of Drousys was in the hands of the Brazilian and U.S. justice systems, and that the company had imposed on itself a moral restriction against bidding. Boscán reminded him that neither the company nor a single executive had been prosecuted in Ecuador, not even for criminal association, two years after the Attorney General's Office began negotiating with it in May 2017. The company left the Metro consortium. The project was completed and the train has been running since December 2023.

Then came the usual silence. No one is talking about the Ruta Viva, La Posta said in July 2019, and so it remained. There is no verdict on the Metro or the Ruta Viva. No one has identified the beneficiary of the five million from Meinl Bank. The Superintendency of Companies never reported an audit of Ecuatoriano Suiza's policies. Ocean Re was investigated in Peru, not in Ecuador. Neither Odebrecht nor its executives were prosecuted in the country.

What did reach a conclusion was the Sobornos (Bribes) case, which grew out of a different leak: Pamela Martínez's green file, published by Fernando Villavicencio and Christian Zurita as Arroz Verde. On February 26, 2020, expert witness Alexandra Mantilla described the organization as a criminal structure led by Rafael Correa, with Glas, Alexis Mera and María de los Ángeles Duarte as coordinators. On April 7, 2020, a court sentenced Correa, Glas, Mera, Duarte, Vinicio Alvarado, Walter Solís and about ten businesspeople to eight years and ordered them to repay 14.7 million, along with a ban on running for office, public apologies and an ethics course. On September 7, 2020, the cassation court upheld the ruling. Correa lives in Belgium; Alvarado in Venezuela; Solís in the United States; Duarte at the Argentine embassy and later in Argentina. Ricardo Rivera, Glas's uncle who collected the bribes, died on January 15, 2022, of COVID complications; the Solicitor General's Office asked for a ban on selling his assets. In February 2022 La Posta checked the accounts: none of them had paid a cent, and Glas, having served 52 percent of his sentence, was denied release by a judge.