MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

US authorities looking into 'possible bribes' in the Petrobras corruption scandal

US authorities are looking into whether Petrobras or its employees, middlemen or contractors, violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

United States authorities are investigating whether Brazil's giant gas and oil corporation Petrobras or its employees were paid bribes, adding to the mounting domestic corruption probes facing the state-controlled oil company.

 The US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the company, whose American depository receipts trade in New York, while the Securities and Exchange Commission is pursuing a civil investigation, according to US media reports.

Brazil's biggest company has become the target of investigations by the federal police and prosecutors that is emerging as one of the country's biggest corruption cases in history. Many of the alleged problems occurred when President Dilma Rousseff was head of the company before taking office in 2011.

US authorities are looking into whether Petrobras or its employees, middlemen or contractors, violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, an anti-corruption statute that makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials to win or retain business, these people say.

Prosecutors in Brazil allege that Petrobras and its contractors over inflated the cost of capital expenditure projects and acquisitions by hundreds of millions of dollars and paid part of the proceeds to politicians from the ruling Workers' Party (PT) coalition.

The two principal figures involved in the alleged scam, Paulo Roberto Costa, a former Petrobras director, and Alberto Youssef, a convicted black market money dealer, have entered into plea bargains in which they allege that ruling coalition politicians received 3% of all contracts.

According to preliminary findings of a tribunal overseeing state spending (TCU) and announced in Brasilia by the tribunal president Augusto Nardes, the figures involve an estimated 792 million in over billing at the Pasadena refinery in the U.S. as well as surplus payments at the Comperj and Abreu e Lima plants being built in Brazil, totaling close to 1.2bn dollars.

The emergence of the US investigations into the allegations, however, could raise the international profile of the scandal and have implications for Petrobras' financial statements.

The company is majority owned by the Brazilian government, an arrangement that US prosecutors have in unrelated cases argued would make them government employees.

Specific transactions under the scanner of Brazilian investigators include the purchase of a refinery by Petrobras in the US and the construction of refineries in Brazil.

In a recent statement Petrobras said that it had hired Brazilian and US private investigators to probe the claims of Mr. Costa. It has also set up internal investigative committees, requested access to police and court records, and sought clarifications from companies cited in the official investigations.

“Petrobras has taken many steps designed to carefully examine the facts,” the company said.