In this post, Dr John Lawrence, a former PhD student of the UCL Institute of the Americas, writes about his recently published book, based on his doctoral dissertation, Take-Up, Resistance and Transformation of Corporate Governance Codes, (Palgrave, 2025). 

A Cure for Private Sector Corruption? Corporate Governance Codes in Peru 

 John Lawrence 

Two events occurred in 2014 that affected corporate life in Peru in two very different ways. 

The first, the Odebrecht scandal, came to light in late 2014, when Brazilian authorities uncovered a massive public sector bribery scheme involving $788 million in bribes across 12 countries in Latin America. Odebrecht was the largest construction company in the region and had created a new department to pay bribes to government officials responsible for contracting with infrastructure firms to build new projects. The scandal is often referred to as Lava Jato or “car wash” because investigations into money laundering through car washes led, through Petrobras, the state oil company, to Odebrecht. The story broke in Peru in 2017. It turned out that Odebrecht had chosen Peru as its staging post outside Brazil because of the high level of tolerance to corruption – Peruvians were believed to be generally tolerant of bribery if it meant that they had new roads and bridges! Pointing to this supposed tolerant attitude to corruption, in their defence, Odebrecht claimed merely to have ‘industrialized a widespread cottage industry’.   (more…)