Eike Batista

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Eike Batista arriving at a court hearing, 2017.

Antonio Lacerda—EPA/Shutterstock.com

Eike Batistais a Brazilian business magnate who made and then lost a fortune in mining and oil and gas exploration.

Batista, one of seven children, was born in the state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. His mother was German, and his father, Eliezer Batista da Silva, was a prominent Brazilian businessman who served as the country’s minister of mines and energy in the 1960s. After spending his early childhood in Brazil, Batista gained his secondary education in Europe. In the 1970s he studied metallurgy at the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University in Aachen, Germany, before returning to Brazil. There, at the age of 23, he launched a company that mined and traded gold.

After making millions of dollars in mining ventures during the 1980s, Batista expanded his business over the following two decades. He invested in a number of industries, including energy generation, petroleum and natural gas exploration, logistics, shipbuilding, and real estate. By 2010 he had established a collection of corporations that operated under the rubric of his EBX Group. Like EBX, each of those corporations had an X in its name, which for Batista symbolized the multiplication of wealth. And indeed, Batista’s net worth grew exponentially after 2007—the year he founded OGX, his oil and gas company. He wasted no time in getting OGX off the ground: that year he spent roughly $1 billion on licenses to explore a number of potentially oil-rich areas off the Brazilian coast. In 2008 Forbes magazine added Batista to its annual list of billionaires, and by 2010 he had climbed the list to become one of the 10 wealthiest people in the world.

Batista’s rise to billionaire status attracted much attention from the media, which dubbed him “King Midas.” His 1991 elopement with model Luma de Oliveira (and the couple’s expensive 2004 divorce) made headlines as did his penchant for pricey speedboat racing and his unabashed vow to become the world’s richest man. Batista’s extravagance and boastfulness inevitably drew criticism, and some Brazilians questioned his integrity. His mining company, MMX, was fined several times for failing to follow environmental regulations, and in 2008 a group of Tupí-Guaraní Indians accused his logistics company, LLX, of using bribery and coercion to force the group off its land. In July 2008 police raided Batista’s offices and home as part of an investigation into allegations of fraud, tax evasion, and gold smuggling; he later was cleared of wrongdoing.

Despite the negative press, Batista continued to win the admiration of many Brazilians, who applauded his goal of making Brazil one of the world’s top economic powers. In 2009 his financial support helped Rio de Janeiro to win its bid for the 2016 Olympic Games.

By 2012 Batista’s personal fortune had swelled to more than $34.5 billion. However, a decline in world petroleum prices and the Brazilian economy coincided with the failure of OGX oil fields to produce at the rates predicted by Batista. As that production declined, Batista struggled to pay off the bond debt he had amassed while expanding his oil exploration and production operations. In October 2013 he defaulted spectacularly on a $45 million interest payment. His empire began to crumble, and he was forced to sell off assets. By 2015 his net worth was negative, having fallen to more than $1 billion in debt.

Meanwhile, Batista’s trial for insider trading began in 2014, but it was suspended the following year after the judge was caught driving one of his cars. Moreover, in January 2017 Batista was arrested and jailed after being accused of paying some $16.5 million in bribes in connection with the Petrobras scandal. In April he was released from prison and placed under house arrest. Later in 2017 Batista was fined $6.3 million for insider trading. His legal troubles continued in 2018, when he was found guilty of bribery and sentenced to 30 years in prison; he remained under house arrest. In 2019 he was arrested and briefly imprisoned on charges of money laundering and insider trading.