‘Cartel’ fixed stadium bids

A construction firm has admitted that a “cartel” of firms fixed bidding for contracts to do work on stadiums for the 2014 World Cup, Brazilian authorities said on Monday.

State antitrust authorities said the probe was linked to the notorious Petrobras corruption scandal that has snared numerous Brazilian politicians.

“There is evidence that at least five public calls for tender linked to work on World Cup stadiums were subject to a cartel,” the Administrative Economic Defense Council (CADE), a state antitrust body, said in a statement.

It said construction firm Andrade Gutierrez spilled the beans on the cartel activity after agreeing to cooperate with investigators in return for being spared sanctions.

Among the building or reno- vation projects involved were some on Rio de Janeiro’s fabled Maracana Stadium and the Arena Pernambuco in Recife, it said.

CADE said the probe was an offshoot of Operation Car Wash, an investigation by prosecutors into a $2 billion corruption affair at state oil firm Petrobras.

That scandal has resulted in the resignation of several ministers in President Michel Temer’s government.

In the World Cup stadium affair, firms conspired to fix the allocating of contracts in public tenders between 2007 and 2011, CADE said.

Andrade Gutierrez’s chief executive Otavio Azevedo is among the top business figures jailed in Operation Car Wash.