Prosecutors in Brazil are charging Latin America’s largest construction company with “human trafficking” and forcing workers to toil in slave labor-like conditions.  They’re demanding the equivalent of A$240 Million in compensation for 500 workers.

The Odebrecht company transported Brazilian workers to a biofuel plant it was constructing across the Atlantic Ocean in Angola.  But the company failed to secure work visas for the workers, instead acquiring 30-day tourist visas, and allegedly lying to Angolan authorities about the length of the workers’ stays.

Officials allege in court documents that “workers, hundreds of them, were subjected to degrading working conditions incompatible with human dignity, and had their freedom curtailed, being deprived of their right to come and go”.  These conditions included foul, substandard sanitation in housing facilities, and filthy water wells.

The complaint says that employees “were treated as modern slaves”, workers “were alone in a foreign country far away”.  Odebrecht, prosecutors said, relied on a captive work force “unable to react or complain about the conditions, unable to find another job, and who could not even leave the construction site".

Odebrecht is reserving comment until it examines the complaint.