Colombian prosecutors said Thursday they had charged dozens of people in connection with the globe-spanning corruption scandal at Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.

Between 2009 and 2016, the company bribed public officials with 80 billion pesos to win a contract to build a 528-kilometre road between the centre of the country and the Caribbean coast, prosecutors said in a statement.

In 2012 Times of Malta reported that a subsidiary of the Brazilian firm - Odebrecht Solutions - winded down its four-man operation just six months after opening shop in Sliema.

Then Finance Minister Tonio Fenech had told Times of Malta the company had moved to Malta during the Libya crisis but had since ceased operations.

But the subsidiary had previous links to Malta: two sister companies were registered here in 2007 – Odebrecht Construction Malta Ltd and Odebrecht Engineering and Construction Ltd.

On Thursday, Colombian prosecutors said 55 people, including a group of 22 former company managers and lobbyists as well as 33 former government officials, had been charged in connection to the scandal.

The company's former president, Marcelo Odebrecht, was among those charged.

Unlike other Latin American countries, Colombia has not tried any high-ranking government officials in the Odebrecht scheme, one of the biggest foreign bribery cases in history. 

An international arrest warrant had been issued for senior Brazilian Odebrecht executives Eder Paolo Ferracuti, Amilton Hideaki and Marcio Marangonni, prosecutors said. 

The executives had already been charged in March 2021 as part of the scandal.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Wednesday asked prosecutors to "reopen" their cases, asking for help from Brazil and the United States to punish the masterminds behind the scandal.

Petro said that prosecutors had "allowed" Odebrecht executives to leave the country so that they would not denounce the politicians who received the bribes. 

"We know who they bribed... who were the intermediaries. But we don't know where the money went, because it went to those with political power", said Petro.

Prosecutors also claimed that Odebrecht had contributed $800,000 to the campaign of former president Juan Manuel Santos, although he was not included in the list of defendants released on Thursday.

Luis Fernando Andrade, the former director of the state-run National Infrastructure Agency was among those charged.

Andrade, a former civil servant and the most senior on the list fled to the United States in 2018, accusing prosecutors of persecution.

In 2016, Odebrecht agreed to pay $3.5 billion in penalties in Brazil, the United States and Switzerland arising out of payments of more than $788 million in bribes to foreign leaders and government officials in order to win infrastructure projects.