Brazil charges Swiss bank manager with laundering bribe money

BRASILIA: 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. David Muino Suarez, a 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 Suarez, 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. They said Suarez concealed the illegal financial operation with false information given to the bank’s compliance office.