Banif and Odebrecht: DCIAP closed case involving 1.4 billion euros in money laundering
The DCIAP quietly closed in July 2025 a decade-long investigation into suspicions of money laundering by Odebrecht at Banif bank, involving more than 1.4 billion euros.
Ten years of Banif investigation end in quiet closure
The Central Department of Criminal Investigation and Prosecution (DCIAP) signed, on 7 July 2025, the order to close the case that for more than a decade had investigated suspicions of money laundering on an industrial scale at Banif bank. According to TVI/CNN Portugal, which had access to the document, prosecutor Diogo Rocha Neves concluded 76 pages of investigation without bringing any charges.
The case focused on hundreds of millions of euros under suspicion that passed through Banif — a bank that was once subject to Portuguese state intervention before its collapse — through offshore entities linked to Brazilian construction group Odebrecht, already investigated in Portugal in the Monte Branco cases and the Baixo Sabor Dam case.
Banif administration knew since 2008
For the Public Prosecutor's Office, it was established that the administration and senior officers of the bank knew, at some point, that various offshore accounts through which hundreds of millions of dollars and euros passed belonged to the Odebrecht group. Prosecutor Rocha Neves made a point of emphasising that the case contains several documents proving this early knowledge.
One of the most revealing elements is a meeting note from Banif's own Board of Directors, dated 4 December 2008, which explicitly mentions one of these entities as part of the Odebrecht group. Nevertheless, in March 2013, when the Bank of Portugal notified Banif to identify all accounts and entities linked to Odebrecht, the bank presented a list of offshore entities stating that "belonging" to the construction company "did not result from any legal evidence, but from the perception of employees due to the coincidence of representatives". The Public Prosecutor's Office classified this response as another example of Banif's "confusion" in monitoring suspicious operations.
The Lava Jato operation that forced the bank's reaction
According to the order, those responsible at Banif were only forced to react more concretely in 2014, when several Portuguese newspapers published news about the Lava Jato operation, revealing the connection between Odebrecht, various offshore entities and corrupt payments that used international financial circuits in which the Madeira-based bank was included. Even after these publications, the bank reported only three suspicious operations to the authorities and continued to claim it did not know the identity of the beneficial owners of the accounts.
It was precisely from these three reports of suspicious operations, recorded by the Judicial Police with Investigation Commencement Numbers (NAI), that the Financial Information Unit (UIF) reached an unexpectedly large financial tangle.
1.4 billion euros in five accounts
In May 2015, the Judicial Police sent to the then director of the DCIAP, Amadeu Guerra, a confidential report titled "Suspicious Operations". The document, to which TVI/CNN Portugal had access, concluded that between 2005 and 2015, accounts at Banif had been used as "transit accounts" — one of them classified even as a dormant account, that is, an account with no activity for many years and with money not claimed by the account holders — for transfers of very large amounts between international companies and offshore centres.
"The total amount identified from the values that passed through the five main accounts exceeds one thousand five hundred million US dollars", states the Judicial Police report — an amount that in May 2015 would have been around 1.4 billion euros.
The Judicial Police attempted to have Banif explain the movements detected, but the bank presented "no justification for the movements analysed", which had almost always had "offshore zones" as their destination.
Clear pattern of money laundering
Financial police experts identified a consistent pattern in the movements: money entered and exited abroad through orders from instrumental companies based in tax havens, without any real economic activity to support them. The interval between entry and subsequent exit was minimal — "in most cases there is simultaneity or proximity between the dates of entry records and subsequent exits, with the accounts showing a zero balance on the dates of the first and last record made", the Judicial Police experts specified.
This pattern — money that enters, circulates briefly and exits without a trace — is, according to the investigators, typical of money laundering schemes associated with corruption crimes.
Accounts emptied, case closed
After ten years of investigation, the result was, in the words of the process itself as reported by CNN Portugal, "a handful of nothing": the suspicious accounts ended up practically emptied before any definitive coercive measure, and the DCIAP closed the investigation without bringing charges.
The quiet closure, which occurred in summer 2025, formally closes one of the most complex chapters of investigation into the Portuguese banking system — a process that covered offshore entities in tax havens, corruption scandals in Brazil and the collapse of a bank that was once rescued by the state.
Source: CNN Portugal