Head Shaved, Ex-Billionaire Batista Jailed in Rio de Janeiro

Source: Bloomberg

Eike Batista, once Brazil’s wealthiest man, has been jailed for alleged corruption after returning to Rio de Janeiro on Monday. Batista was sent to a prison in western Rio after undergoing the standard procedure of having his hair sheared, according to the state’s penitentiary authority. Police arrested him hours earlier on the tarmac of the city’s international airport as he returned from New York City. The night before, in John F. Kennedy International’s lobby, he took pictures with fellow travelers and spoke to a Globo TV journalist.

Federal prosecutors accuse Batista of money laundering and corruption, including the payment of $16.5 million in bribes to former Rio Governor Sergio Cabral, jailed in November. Both are targets in the long-running Carwash investigation of kickbacks involving Brazil’s biggest builders and state-run oil producer Petrobras. The probe has advanced to threaten sitting legislators, and the Supreme Court approved on Monday its broadest plea deal yet. A prospective bargain from Batista could further rankle the political establishment.

Police had sought to arrest Batista four days earlier in Rio. In a pre-dawn raid of his hillside mansion on Thursday, they found a Lamborghini Aventador luxury sports car parked in his living room and about 100,000 reais ($30,000) in cash inside a safe, but not their suspect, who had flown to New York less than 36 hours before. Calling him a fugitive, Brazilian authorities included Batista’s name on Interpol’s list of wanted persons.

Batista’s commodities and logistics empire raised his personal fortune to more than $30 billion at the start of the decade, turning him into one of the wealthiest people in the world. Those riches evaporated after his group of startups went bust under a mountain of debt and insider trading investigations. At one point in 2015, he gained the rare distinction of “negative billionaire” when his net worth sank to more than $1 billion in debt.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-01-30/fugitive-ex-billionaire-batista-flying-to-brazil-to-face-arrest