In a scheme so elegantly simple it almost deserves a business school case study, executives at Petrobras — Brazil's crown jewel state oil company, sitting atop one of the world's most valuable oil reserves — quietly agreed that 3% of every major contract signed between 2004 and 2012 would be skimmed off the top as kickbacks. Not to fund orphanages. To fund politicians and line executive pockets. Paulo Roberto Costa, the director of refining and supply, was the man who helpfully explained all this to investigators after his arrest, describing how he and fellow Petrobras directors had been deliberately overpaying on contracts for drilling rigs, refineries, and office construction. The contractors, naturally, had formed a cozy cartel to keep the arrangement humming. When Petrobras finally got around to publishing its 2014 results — several months late, because accounting for industrial-scale theft takes time — it announced losses of $7 billion for the year, its first loss in decades. The company estimated corruption costs had hit $2 billion. Brazil's lottery ticket, as Petrobras was once fondly called, had been scratched clean by the people running the lottery.