Welcome back to the Trace podcast, Brib, Swindle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're

talking about Brazil with my guest, Rafael Gomez. Rafael has been the chief governance and

compliance officer at Petrobras for about six months. He has extensive experience in senior roles in the legal department of Sun Microsystems,

and then later as General Counsel, Legal VP, and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer for Walmart, Brazil.

Between in-house positions, he's also worked at law firms where he focused on a broad range of issues for his clients.

Rafael, thank you for joining me range of issues for his clients.

Rafael, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for the opportunity.

It's really a pleasure to talk to an expert in Brazil because there is so much going on there right now.

A few years ago, with its hosting of the World Cup and the Summer Olympics still on the horizon,

Brazil seemed to be positioning itself to get

really tough on corruption. But since then, we've seen Lava Jato, Petrobras, Odebrecht's

odabrek scandals, and the impeachment and imprisonment of some political officials at the

highest levels in Brazil. Should we see everything that's happened in these last couple of years as a

positive sign? Or does the volume of cases there mean that the problem is somehow intractable?

First of all, I think that it was, those were interesting times because we were expecting

two of the major world sporting events to happen in Brazil.

It was supposed to be fun time, exciting times, and all those was expected to feel development,

economic development, investments, and so on. The problem is that in 2013,

things, one year before the World Cup, things turned really bad. The crisis was clearly on

the horizon, the economic crisis. And then incumbent president's popularity and approval rates were going down. People were unhappy with

many things and there were many protests, ugly protests on the streets and so on. And so

...