LIMA (Reuters) - The office of Peru's attorney general announced on Monday that it has asked Odebrecht for a "significant sum" of money as part of talks toward a plea deal, after the Brazilian company acknowledged distributing bribes to unnamed Peruvian officials.
The total amount Odebrecht will be required to pay will be negotiated with the company after it makes an initial deposit, said Hamilton Castro, the lead prosecutor investigating the public works contracts in Peru that Odebrecht may have won through bribes.
Last month Odebrecht, at the center of Brazil's biggest ever graft scandal, signed a plea deal in the United States in which it admitted to distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to secure contracts in several countries in Latin America, including $29 million in Peru from which it obtained more than $143 million in benefits.
"The illegal earnings that the company obtained must be returned to the Peruvian state, that's why we're negotiating a significant sum of cash that must be deposited in public coffers as prepayment. It will not be the total sum," Castro told a press conference.
Castro, who traveled to Switzerland to talk with prosecutors about Odebrecht last year, said he expects prosecutors abroad to provide the names of Peruvian officials who took bribes from Odebrecht in coming months.
But Castro said direct talks with the company would quicken the investigation that he started in November after intelligence revealed potential bribes in Peru.
Odebrecht did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Peru was the first country outside Brazil where the family-owned construction company ventured nearly four decades ago. It is home to some of Odebrecht's most ambitious projects, including an irrigation tunnel through the Andes and a highway through the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).