A Brazilian judge has been stymied in efforts to prosecute former Greek honorary consul Konstantinos Kotronakis and his son Georgios on charges that they were involved in paying bribes to secure tanker charter deals with Petrobras.
The pair were among 10 defendants whom Brazilian prosecutors charged in 2019 on suspicion of involvement in paying $17.6m in bribes and other illicit payments to secure deals with the government-controlled oil giant.
The allegations were part of the long-running Operation Car Wash bribery investigation that started in 2014 and has continued since 2019 under federal investigative judge Luiz Antonio Bonat.
But the court docket shows the case against the Kotronakises, which Bonat separated out from the other defendants accused of corruption and money laundering in connection with the charter deals, has stalled because of a lack of response from Greece.
Last November, Bonat said that Brazil’s Department of Assets Recovery & International Legal Cooperation told him three times that Greek authorities had not responded to his summons for the two Greek defendants.
“I emphasise that the letter rogatory was sent about 11 months ago, and the first request for information was made in May of this year,” he wrote in a court order at the time.
Another ruling, in March this year, shows that Bonat asked federal prosecutors for an update on officials’ requests for cooperation with Greece after a 90-day suspension of the case.
The court record does not show that prosecutors in Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry responded.
Greece and Brazil have no bilateral agreement for international cooperation in such cases.
When asked by TradeWinds about the status of requests for cooperation from Greece, ministry spokesman Caio Andrade told TradeWinds that such requests are handled confidentially by an office of Brazil’s Prosecutor General of the Republic.
“Therefore, it is not possible to provide more information,” he said.
Spokespeople for Greece’s Ministry of Justice, Transparency & Human Rights, which handles such international cooperation requests, did not respond to a request for comment by the deadline for this story.
According to the 2019 criminal complaint, the Kotronakises, whose co-defendants included former Brazilian senator Ney Suassuna, were accused of paying kickbacks to former Petrobras supply chief Paulo Roberto Costa to secure charters for well-known Greek shipowners. Costa became a leading witness for prosecutors, earning him the nickname “Walking Bomb”.
Legal papers named Athenian Sea Carriers, Tsakos Energy Navigation (TEN), Aegean Shipping Management and Dorian (Hellas) as shipowners that allegedly benefited from the kickbacks scheme, although the companies were not charged.
TradeWinds has requested comment from all four shipowners. In April, New York-listed TEN said in its annual report to securities regulators that US officials began an investigation in 2020 into whether actions associated with the Brazilian charters constituted violations of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
“The company is always committed to doing business in accordance with anti-corruption laws and is cooperating with these agencies,” TEN said.
