The suggestive name of the PSDB's corruption account: Orange.
According to the Federal Police, the current account used to pay the alleged bribes from Alstom to the PSDB party and the São Paulo state government was called Orange Internacional. It had already been mentioned in investigations by the Public Prosecutor's Office in 2004 regarding remittances of foreign currency to a former director of Banco do Brasil during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration.
247 The name couldn't be more suggestive. The Federal Police detected that the current account used to pay the alleged bribes from Alstom to the PSDB and the São Paulo government was called Orange Internacional (International Orange, in Portuguese).
According to information from Estadão, the Federal Police found the account while investigating four deposits in 1998 that totaled US$1,44 million (adjusted for inflation). It was operated through MTB Bank in New York.
The same Orange International had already been mentioned in investigations by the Public Prosecutor's Office in 2004 regarding remittances of foreign currency to a former director of Banco do Brasil during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. In addition to Orange, the Kisser Investment SA account at Bank Audi in Luxembourg allegedly held remittances from Alstom.
The account description is found in the testimony of lobbyist Romeu Pinto Junior. He stated that French executives Pierre Chazot and Philippe Jafre ordered him to deliver "packages of money" to people he didn't know.
The Federal Police indicted São Paulo city councilman Andrea Matarazzo (PSDB) on suspicion of passive corruption, believing he received bribes from the French group Alstom when he was state Secretary of Energy in 1998.
In the final report of the investigation, based on information obtained by the Swiss Public Prosecutor's Office, investigator Milton Fornazari Junior cites as evidence to indict Matarazzo an exchange of messages from 1997 in which Alstom executives allegedly discussed the payment of bribes to the PSDB party, the Energy Secretariat, and the Court of Auditors.
In Switzerland, Alstom paid US$43,5 million to the courts to suspend the proceedings in which it was accused of corruption and money laundering in Brazil. During the proceedings, executives confessed to distributing bribes of US$6,5 million to officials in the São Paulo state administration in exchange for a US$45 million contract for the expansion of the metro system between 1998 and 2001.