A Brazilian judge on Tuesday sentenced Marcelo Odebrecht, the former chief executive officer of South America’s biggest construction company, to 19 years in prison for his involvement in a sprawling corruption scandal centered on Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, The Wall Street Journal reported. The scion of a billionaire family, 47-year-old Mr. Odebrecht was convicted of money laundering, corruption and organized crime. He was CEO of Odebrecht SA when he was arrested and jailed last June. He later resigned from the company founded by his grandfather.

Brazil’s economy suffered its biggest contraction in 2½ decades last year as the country’s recession stretched through the fourth quarter with little sign of abating, The Wall Street Journal reported. Gross domestic product shrank 3.8% in 2015, Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, or IBGE, said Thursday. That was the biggest drop since 1990, when the economy contracted 4.3%. But in contrast to that downturn, which was preceded and followed by at least modest expansions, few economists predict a recovery soon for Latin America’s biggest economy.

Argentina’s deal to put a bitter 15-year creditor saga behind it won’t come cheap, Bloomberg News reported. On Sunday, the country agreed to terms with bondholders led by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer over unpaid debts from its record $95 billion default in 2001. The settlement, which will let Argentina regain access to overseas bond markets, is the biggest, and arguably the most significant, in a string of creditor accords struck by President Mauricio Macri since he took office Dec. 10. The tab for all these deals?

Argentina is poised to return to international capital markets after a 15-year ban as it finally reached an agreement with a group of creditors led by Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, the Financial Times reported. The deal, which has to be approved by Argentine lawmakers, is to pay $4.653bn to settle all claims with four “holdouts” that had refused to restructure debt after the country’s 2001 default.

Brazil’s real weakened after inflation surprisingly accelerated and as Goldman Sachs said the currency is poised to drop another 11 percent this year while the government struggles to contain consumer-price increases and shore up its budget, Bloomberg News reported.

Brazil’s real weakened after inflation surprisingly accelerated and as Goldman Sachs said the currency is poised to drop another 11 percent this year while the government struggles to contain consumer-price increases and shore up its budget, Bloomberg News reported.

After winning a victory in its decade-long battle with a group of US hedge funds in a New York court, attention now switches to Argentina’s congress. Judge Thomas Griesa said on Friday that he would lift a controversial financial blockade preventing Argentina’s access to the international capital markets, the Financial Times reported.

Sete Brasil Participações SA plans to file for bankruptcy protection if state-controlled oil producer Petróleo Brasileiro SA, the rig builder's sole client, fails to present a final lease contract proposal in a week's time, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Friday, Reuters reported. Both Sete Brasil and Petrobras declined to comment.

President Nicolas Maduro missed an opportunity to salvage Venezuela’s ruined economy on Wednesday with half-hearted measures that failed to reassure analysts at banks including Barclays Plc and Citigroup Inc. that the country can avoid default this year, Bloomberg News reported. Maduro raised the price of gasoline 60-fold to 6 bolivars a liter, still the world’s cheapest, and promised to devalue the official exchange rate to 10 bolivars per dollar from 6.3.

Creditors of Brazilian engineering group Schahin, which was snared in the country's biggest-ever corruption investigation, may reject a recovery plan in a vote at a Wednesday assembly, according to newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. Estado reported, without saying how it obtained the information, that banks holding Schahin's debt found the plan to be unrealistic and ongoing negotiations to be unproductive. A Schahin representative had no immediate comment on the report.