Ratas de Lima:
A story of corruption, power, and a city’s fight back
Download PDF: Ratas de Lima report
Download PDF: Ratas de Lima, Exhibit 1
Download PDF: Ratas de Lima, Exhibit 2
Download PDF: Ratas de Lima, Exhibit 3
Summary. Canada’s new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, is behind a corruption-plagued South American toll road scheme, swamped in litigation over bribes paid to the mayor who issued the contract.
The Rutas de Lima toll road project, meant to ease the paralyzing traffic in the Peruvian capital, collapsed into scandal with revelations that the Brazilian firm Odebrecht had bribed the mayor with $3 million in 2013 for a 30-year contract to run the highway system.
Instead of relief, Rutas brought predatory toll hikes that crushed the working poor, while Odebrecht pocketed the money. Brazilian authorities, in their expansive Operation Car Wash investigation of international corruption networks, led to Odebrecht pleading guilty in 2016 to what the U.S. Department of Justice called “the largest foreign bribery case in history.”
Yet, the elaborate plea bargain arrangement with DOJ in New York oddly omitted any reference to Rutas de Lima. Just before the scandal broke wide open, Odebrecht offloaded most of its stake to Brookfield, a Toronto-based investment and asset management giant, for about $500 million.
Brookfield knew South American public works business like few others. But it claimed its due diligence had found nothing wrong with its new Odebrecht asset.
New leadership emerged in 2022. On one side stood Brookfield chairman Mark Carney, a powerful ESG or Environment, Social, and Governance advocate – and now Canada’s prime minister – who sidestepped the mess while his company kept turning the screws on the city of Lima. On the other side emerged Lima’s freshly elected Mayor Rafael López Aliaga, a populist fighting to dismantle the corrupt contract.
Brookfield defended its soiled Rutas asset through costly United Nations arbitration, profiting from Rutas escaping itemization in the 2016 plea bargain. The tolls remain, doubts swirl about the DOJ prosecutors’ impartiality during the plea bargain – particularly Andrew Weissman, the ex-DOJ Fraud Section chief – that let Odebrecht pay at the lowest end of the sentencing guideline range and kept Rutas’ name out of the arrangement.
Brookfield then went on the offensive against Lima, portraying itself as the victim and suing the city for $2.7 billion in lost revenue. “Rutas” or “Routes” had become toxic in the eyes of many locals who now call the highway project “Ratas de Lima,” or Rats of Lima.