Brazilian construction company Odebrecht announced on Friday that it will be renamed Novonor, a change of name and brand that “represents the culmination of the transformation the company has undergone over the past five years”.
As reported by the company, Novonor will emerge as the holding company of a business group with 25,000 employees and six companies in engineering and construction, urban mobility and roads, oil and gas, real estate, petrochemicals and shipbuilding.
The name change is part of the agreements the group has concluded with the judicial authorities following its involvement in several corruption cases in the ‘Lava Jato’ operation.
At the end of 2016, some senior executives of the Brazilian company admitted to the American justice system that Latin America had made bribes worth more than 700 million euros to win contracts for more than 100 projects across the region, from the Dominican Republic to Argentina.
Over the past five years, the company has implemented “a compliance system in line with the standards of major international companies” by changing its internal processes and working methods.
“This is a historic decision for us. We present the brand of a fully transformed company, which from now on begins to tell its story and always looks to the future,” said majority shareholder Maurício Odebrecht.
Odebrecht added that with this action it does not erase the past, but looks to the future. “After everything we’ve promoted in terms of change and course correction, we’re now looking at what we want to be, a company inspired by the future. This is our new north,” he said.