Norberto Odebrecht

Norberto Odebrecht was a Brazilian engineer, businessman and philanthropist. He was the founder of Odebrecht Group, one of the largest engineering and construction companies in Latin America. He was born on October 9, 1920, in Recife, Brazil, to a family of German immigrants. He studied at the Polytechnic School of Bahia and took over his father's small engineering business at the age of 21. He transformed it into a construction company that expanded rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, when Brazil's military government invested heavily in infrastructure projects. Odebrecht Group became an international conglomerate with operations in more than 60 countries and over 200,000 employees. It was involved in some of the most ambitious and challenging projects in the region, such as paving a road across the Andes and the Amazon to Peru, drilling a tunnel to divert a river from the Amazon basin to a dam on the Pacific side of the Andes, and building four of the 12 stadiums that hosted the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Odebrecht was also a philanthropist who founded the Odebrecht Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports social and environmental initiatives in Brazil. He died on July 19, 2014, in Salvador, Bahia, at the age of 93. He was survived by his wife Lídia, his son Emílio, who succeeded him as the president of Odebrecht Group, and his grandson Marcelo, who became the CEO of the company in 2008.