Former BSI manager arrested in Brazil for laundering bribe case

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a Spanish-Swiss banker with laundering $21.7 million in graft money for Brazilian clients involved in the country’s largest corruption scandal, including jailed former lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, Reuters reported.

The former relationship manager of Zurich-based BSI bank, was arrested at Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos airport as he got off a flight from Switzerland on Nov. 27 and is being held in Curitiba, the centre of the so-called Car Wash investigation.

The federal prosecutors’ office in Curitiba said in a statement that the manager, who has dual Swiss-Spanish nationality, knew the money came from bribes paid to Cunha and Pedro Bastos, a former executive at state-run oil company Petrobras, from an oil field acquisition in the African nation of Benin in 2011.

The ex-BSI man is alleged to have washed briberies worth $21.7 million through offshore accounts, according to reports.

The Swiss federal attorney general has also been active in the case, freezing assets worth about $800 million on Swiss accounts.

In total, 60 investigations were launched since April 2014, with money-laundering and bribery charges as a consequence. Investigators have sifted through thousands of bank documents at more than 40 institutes.