Marcelo Odebrecht's Emails "Disappear" from Odebrecht Group Server

03/08/2016 - 09h36

An email account under the name of "mbahia", which was used by Marcelo Odebrecht, CEO of the Odebrecht engineering conglomerate, has "disappeared", and cannot be recovered due to a lack of "backup" on the Odebrecht servers, according to Alessandro Tomazela, the group's head of IT.

This was the justification provided by Tomazela for failure to comply with a court order to hand over copies of all messages related to Marcelo Odebrecht's account. The CEO has been in jail since July 2015.

The computers that store the group's emails are physically located in Panama, but Tomazela, who has remote access to the servers, says that he was unable to find records of Odebrecht's emails either on the servers or on the backups. He denies that they have been deleted.

Tomazela could not provide a clear explanation for the disappearance of the mbahia files (the account existed until January 31). He said that email data is automatically deleted when staff leave Odebrecht, without HR having to notify the IT department.

Tomazela made a statement in São Paulo on February 22, the day the Federal Police opened the Acarajé phase of Operation Lava Jato, which is investigating the Workers' Party political strategist João Santana.

Tomazela said that only email accounts with up to three gigabytes of data are backed up. Email accounts with more than ten gigabytes of data have no backup in the corporation.

However, specialists have said that this explanation is unlikely, as email storage capacity is usually higher for those with more responsibility within a company.

Translated by TOM GATEHOUSE

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	Paulo Lisboa - 1º.set.2015/Efe
	Marcelo Odebrecht gestures during a hearing of the parliamentary committee of the Petrobras investigation in Curitiba