22 August 2020
The Public Prosecutor filed charges in court against Wanderley Saraiva, a representative hired by AP Moller Maersk, and Viggo Andersen, the company’s director in Brazil, for their alleged participation in the corrupt plot in the state oil company Petrobras.
A statement released by prosecutors on Friday (21 August 2020) said a former Maersk executive in Brazil, Viggo Andersen, participated in a scheme that resulted in a loss of at least $31.7 million for Petrobras.
Andersen paid bribe to a Petrobras executive, through an intermediary, in exchange for information that would get more business to Maersk.
Andersen inflated freight charges and transferred 2.5% of the contract price to Maersk commercial representative Wanderley Gandra, who acted as a financial operator for the scheme, the prosecutors said. The scheme operated from 2006 to 2014. Costa was arrested in 2014. He was the first of more than 100 people who entered a plea deal with prosecutors. He has provided investigators with information on contracts he oversaw, including with Maersk and other international offshore suppliers.
Gandra, then sent some of the money to Paulo Roberto Costa, a former Petrobras top executive, who supplied confidential information on the state oil company’s shipping needs back to Maersk. Costa received about $750,000 in bribes from Gandra. Andersen left Maersk in 2017, according to his LinkedIn page.
A judge must still decide whether to start a criminal case against Andersen and Gandra or drop the charges.
