Brazilian national Jose Carlos Grubisich, former CEO and a director of Braskem, a publicly traded petrochemical company in Brazil, was sentenced on October 12 in a US court to 20 months in jail for diverting approximately $250m from Braskem into a secret slush fund and paying bribes to government officials and political parties.
In addition to his prison sentence, Grubisich was ordered to forfeit $2.2m and pay a $1m fine.
According to court documents, between approximately 2002 and 2014, Grubisich and his co-conspirators generated money for the slush fund through fraudulent contracts and offshore shell companies secretly controlled by Braskem. He pleaded guilty on April 15 to one count of conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), and one count of conspiracy to violate the books and records provision of the FCPA and to fail to accurately certify Braskem’s financial reports.
In December 2016, Braskem and its parent company Odebrecht, pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of New York to conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA.
