IN 2014 Brazilian builders had a bumper year. Stadiums had to be ready in a dozen cities for the football World Cup in June, airports spruced up to welcome foreign visitors, and roads built to whisk them to venues. In Rio de Janeiro work was beginning in earnest on preparations for the Olympic Games it will host in 2016. President Dilma Rousseff was seeking re-election, and boosted the federal government’s infrastructure spending in the run-up to October’s tightly contested poll. Construction firms’ revenues had already been rising by 11% a year, in real terms, for the past ten years.
However, in September a police investigation found that some of this growth was thanks to padded contracts that at least six of Brazil’s biggest construction firms, with combined domestic revenues of 19 billion reais ($8.8 billion) in 2013, had for years been signing with Petrobras, the state-controlled oil giant, in exchange for kickbacks to politicians. Around 30 construction executives are now awaiting trial on charges of corruption or money-laundering, including the boss of UTC Engenharia, Brazil’s...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1R6GZFJ
No comments:
Post a Comment