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Billionaire Brazilian has superyacht Spirit of Brazil VIII seized by police

Brazilian billionaire and superyacht owner Eike Batista has had his yacht Spirit of Brazil VIII seized by police.

Five days after Eike Batista had his house in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, raided by the Brazilian police force, the police have now taken Eike Batista's yacht, three personal watercraft and a speedboat.

Spirit of Brazil VIII is a 35.37 metre Pershing 115, the flagship of the Pershing fleet. The high-performance yacht – by Italian production builder Pershing, part of the Ferretti Group – can hit a top speed of 36 knots powered by a gas turbine and 3,510hp engines. The Pershing 115 is designed by Fulvio De Simoni, Advanced Yacht Technology and Ferretti's in-house engineers.

Eike Batista is currently on trial, being charged with alleged insider trading and market manipulation. The confiscation of Eike Batista's assets come just after Brazil's federal judge Flavio Roberto de Souza ordered all of Batista's financial assets in Brazil to be seized, which includes his airplanes and the property owned by himself and his sons Thor and Olin and his former wife Luma de Oliveira, and Flavia Sampaio, mother of his third son – in total all assets are worth up to 1.5 billion reais (or £342,830,400).

He made his first million before he was 24, trading on gold, and Eike Batista has been a bold figure in the world's richest list stratosphere – ranking as 10th richest in the world by 2012, according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, with a net worth of $31.9 billion at the time and stating he would one day claim the top spot as the richest. Eike Batista has certainly enjoyed a playboy lifestyle: marrying a Playboy model, racing speedboats and enjoying life on his superyacht. But his prosperous path has hit rocky times, with his oil conglomerate OGX Petroleo & Gas Participacoes SA quickly losing value over the past years.

The fate of Spirit of Brazil VIII is unknown at this time

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Police seized 'negative billionaire' Eike Batista's yacht too

Last week Brazilian police raided the home of once multibillionaire, now negative billionaire , Eike Batista. They froze his assets and took his Lamborghini, as well as six other cars, some fancy watches, and a pile of cash.

Now they've taken things a step further and seized his water toys too  – including jet skis, a speedboat, and his yacht, the Spirit of Brazil, Bloomberg reported .

This comes after Batista's oil company, OGX, lost $9.7 billion and went bankrupt in 2013, pulling his own net worth down to about $200 million.

Then Batista went on trial for insider trading and stock manipulation.

The story is, Batista started to suspect that OGX's oil fields wouldn't deliver, and personally guaranteed $1 billion to keep things running.

It was enough to stabilize the plunging stock.

Then, prosecutors say, Batista made his move: when suspicions were confirmed and things really started to look bleak for the company, he allegedly sold his own stock and abandoned his $1 billion promise.

Now, four of Batista's companies are bankrupt and he reportedly owes $1.2 billion.

Watch: This Billionaire's Definition Of Success Will Surprise You

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Eike batista: boats of former billionaire seized to repay $1b debt.

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BOATING; Brazilian Superboat Driver Finds Speed 'in the Blood'

By Barbara Lloyd

• Oct. 6, 1991

Taking risks is part of life for Eike Batista, a 34-year-old Brazilian entrepreneur who a decade ago combed the Amazon jungles in search of gold dust. He has since cashed in on his Indiana Jones life style, preferring instead a home at New York's Trump Plaza and a crack at the national offshore powerboat championship.

Batista drives Spirit of the Amazon, a 50-foot speed machine that has dominated the offshore powerboat circuit this year. His craft, which carries four 1,100-horsepower engines, is one of 10 Superboats expected to race today in the $75,000 New York Offshore Grand Prix on the Hudson River.

Twenty-six boats have registered to compete for national titles in four divisions, including the less powerful Open Class boats, and the Pro-1 and Pro-2 Classes. The 144-mile course consists of 18 laps of 8.04 miles each; the loop starts at Pier 45, south of Battery Park City, moves to 40th Street, and then returns back to Pier 45.

Batista flew here Friday from his home and business headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. As chairman of the board of TVX Gold, an international mining company, Batista is far removed from the days when his livelihood depended on single-engine aircraft and dirt runways.

His life now is a series of global meetings. A corporate executive who speaks five languages, Batista oversees gold mines in Canada, the United States, Brazil and Chile. As a sportsman, he is supporting the national powerboat racing circuit for the next three years with a guarantee of $5 million. As a driver, he leads this year's circuit in points. 'A Different Culture'

In a telephone interview from Rio de Janiero, Batista linked his success in Superboat racing with the fascination for going fast that, he said, is part of his Brazilian upbringing. "Speed is in the blood of most Brazilians," he said, noting that Brazilian Formula I race car drivers Ayrton Senna and Nelson Piquet are friends of his.

"Basically, there are no lines separating one lane from another lane on roads in Brazil," Batista said. "People drive as fast as they can go. There are official speed limits, but little enforcement. It's a different culture altogether."

The danger may also be part of what appeals to Batista about powerboat racing. "There is a lot of thrill in it," he said. "But I lived dangerously in my early gold-mining days."

The Superboats are capable of 130-mile-an-hour speeds, and are particularly difficult to maneuver here in the choppy seas created by lap racing in the river. Last year in New York, he and his Spirit of the Amazon team withdrew from the Hudson River race when the boat hit a submerged object. It was an "extremely dangerous" situation, said Batista, noting that the obstruction could have flipped the boat. The man may live for "the thrill in it," but he has no death wish.

When he realized the dangers in gold trading were becoming life threatening after a particularly frightening incident in 1980, Batista gave it up. The story is straight out of Indiana Jones. Carrying a loaded handgun and a bag of gold dust worth $200,000, he was preparing to board a small plane on a jungle runway. With him were two bodyguards. In the distance, he saw a man gunned down for offending a village chief whom Batista had relied on. Batista realized he could be next. 'He Doesn't Get Scared'

Batista left the jungle behind and used his experiences there to develop an international mining company. A degree in metallurgical engineering from the University of Aachen in Germany made Batista familiar not only with mining but with the mechanics of his boat. "I don't make any compromises with the equipment," he said. "A lot of racers don't understand their equipment."

Bobby Moore, the Spirit of Amazon's throttleman, said that Batista's knowledge of the boat was a great advantage. "He's aggressive as hell, and likes to win," said Moore. "He's also mechanically inclined, and that's important for a racer. It's really what makes him a step above the others. He doesn't get scared."

Moore, of Miramar, Fla., is a 28-year veteran of offshore racing who has crewed on four world champion teams. Moore was with Batista last year when Spirit of the Amazon won the world offshore title in Key West, Fla. Also in the boat are Randy Robinson of Miramar, crew chief and co-navigator, and Larry Williams of Kula, Maui, Hawaii, co-navigator.

Batista is a favorite in the New York race, especially in the absence of Chuck Norris, the movie actor, who won the event last year in a close match against one of his Hollywood counterparts, Don Johnson. Neither actor has participated in the racing circuit this year.

Behind Batista in overall points is Powerboat Marine Products, a Superboat owned and driven by Russ Wilkin of Fort Wayne, Ind. If Wilkin should win today's race, Batista must finish in at least seventh-place to beat Wilkin for the national title. America's Cup Challengers Meet

Ten challengers for the America's Cup, who met Thursday in San Tropez, France, agreed on how to proceed in their argument with the San Diego Yacht Club about the date when they must have their final race boats in San Diego. They decided to present questions over the disputed dates to a special committee of trustees (former guardians of the America's Cup) on Oct. 15. The group also announced its trial races series will begin Jan. 25 in San Diego.

The Rise And Fall Of Brazilian Billionaire Eike Batista

Eike Bastista was the world’s eighth-richest man, and the poster-boy for the new Brazil, flashy and flush with wealth—until his oil and gas bubble burst.

Mac Margolis

Eduardo Martino/archivolatino/Redux

One day, some 30 years ago, before the trophy wife and the floodlights, when a berth on the Forbes billionaires list was still a moon shot, Eike Batista was restless. At age 23, he’d had enough of Europe and the golden cage he’d spent his childhood in, and decided to move back to his native Brazil to make something of himself. The engineering school dropout had sold corned beef to Africa and brokered some Brazilian diamonds with mixed success. But Batista wanted something bigger.

He found it in a glossy photomagazine with a feature on the Amazon gold rush. “I knew that’s where I wanted to be,” he said in an interview two years ago. His father, Eliezer Batista, a legendary Brazilian mining executive, was livid. “I’m going to give you an idiot’s diploma!” he exploded, pounding a fist on the dining room table when he learned his son had bought into a rainforest gold mine. They didn’t talk to each other for the next 10 years, but the young Batista didn’t back down. “This was alluvial gold,” he said. “It was idiot-proof.”

For the next three decades, versions of that scene—the parental scolding, doubling down against withering odds, a daredevil’s self-confidence, a choirboy’s belief in “idiot-proof” assets—would loop over and over again through Batista’s career. If his father doubted him, Batista’s mother pumped him up. “She called me Goldesel,” he said, recalling the Grimm brothers’ fairytale about the good luck donkey that dropped gold pieces from its mouth.

With his bullet-proof ego and camera-ready smile, Batista parlayed his stakes in Amazon gold into cash and then into cachet to leverage ever bigger ventures. In a little less than a generation, he’d rebooted himself into this emerging nation’s alpha investor, shedding the image of pampered playboy to become the world’s eighth richest man, courted by investors and politicians alike.

When he was king, everyone—Anglo American, Pimco, Black Rock, the Schlumberger Group—wanted a piece of Eike (pronounced Ike), as Brazilians know him. His emerging mining and energy conglomerate rocketed to the top of the São Paulo stock market. Cordial and bullish, with a tropical swagger to his step, Batista was not just a Brazilianaire but an emblem of Brazil itself, a sleeper country now aggressively on the make. Some two million people followed his Twitter feed.

It was only fitting that Batista’s fall would be just as spectacular. On Oct. 30, Batista’s signature oil and gas company, OGX, filed for bankruptcy. Once the bluest chip on the São Paulo bourse, worth $35 billion in 2011, OGX is trading at a few cents a share. His mining, logistics and energy companies have been taken over by foreign investors. The net value of the entire cluster of Batista’s businesses, each branded with a letter X, a symbol for the multiplication of wealth, has turned to dust.

Minority stakeholders, who eagerly hitched their wagons to Eike’s rising star, are scrambling to court to recover their crumbling investments. The policy whizzes in Brasilia who reveled in the new national business icon are mulling over how to retrieve the $2.9 billion they loaned to Batista at sweetheart rates through the publicly subsidized development bank. Reporters are no longer invited to helicopter out to the future site of his superport. Batista’s patented pink tie and Cheshire cat smile no longer light up the Rio night. His Twitter feed has gone silent.

Not surprisingly, the slow motion fall of Batista’s holdings has become this year’s rolling headline in Brazil, and beyond. Yet many savvy investors saw trouble coming two years back, when the value of Batista’s corporate portfolio ballooned in the stock market even before he had fetched a single barrel of oil from the ocean floor or loaded his first ton of coal. Yet in road show after road show, he talked up a storm. The massive Porto Açu, a superport and planned city complex north of Rio, may have been little more than a sea bridge connected to a bald building site, but Eike managed to draw world class partners on board.

Investors were impressed with his grasp of details and 30,000-foot perspective on logistics and economies of scale. They winked at his bare knuckle business style and his reputation as a corporate raider, poaching alpha executives from Petrobras, Vale and other mega companies, with lavish pay and stock options. In vexatious Latin America, they knew that a blue chip ego was an asset. “I see myself as a knight of efficiency. If there is something that isn’t efficient, I’m going to break it down,” he said. “The Google guys do that. Steve Jobs was famous for that. They look for ways to make life more user-friendly and that’s how I see myself.”

In time, as production targets were missed and delayed, skepticism stirred. Was Batista all smoke and mirrors? Still, he talked a good game. “Batista doesn’t think big, he thinks huge,” said Armínio Fraga, an investor and former Brazilian Central Bank president, who briefly held a stake in one of the X companies. The joke in the financial trenches was that after Bill Gates, no one had made so much money off of PowerPoint. Eike waved away the Cassandras and spun his dedication to “fundamentals.” “These are not subprime mortgages,” he said of his portfolio that stretched from shipyards to oil rigs. “This is productive investment.” After all, he sat on mountains of ultra high grade Colombian coal and his oil was in shallow offshore wells, not the deepwater crude that Brazil had just discovered a daunting four miles below the surface of the Atlantic. “These are idiot-proof assets,” he said, repeating the blue skies refrain he’d coined a quarter century earlier.

Batista’s eccentricity also helped inflate the X bubble. He was a rarity in a country where the superrich shun publicity or pretend they are like everyone else. Unashamed about his wealth—made from sweat not speculation, he claimed—he worked at leveraging fortune into celebrity. Back in the nineties, when he was already fabulously rich, Batista was known—and often lampooned—as the heat-seeking scion of a top Brazilian mining official and the husband of a carnival queen. Mr. Luma de Oliveira, they called him, after his supernova wife, whom he later divorced. Other moguls might collect Picassos. Batista, a onetime powerboat racer, favored fast cars and yachts. For years, he kept a Lamborghini and a silver Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren in his living room.

Even when giving, Batista went over the top. He paid over $550,000 at a benefit auction for the jersey of national football hall-of-famer, Ronaldo, and brought Madonna to tears by pledging $7 million to her charity, Success For Kids. When physicians from a struggling public hospital in Rio needed an MRI machine, Batista wrote them a $1.5 million check and shelled out another $500,000 to install it. “I was floored,” says neurosurgeon Paulo Niemeyer, who had contacted Batista for the event.

Every tycoon has a shtick but in business, Batista was all brass knuckles. By the mid-2000s he had shed the showboat wife (reportedly paying Playboy to kill a photo spread of her) and started plunging money into multimillion dollar plays in energy, infrastructure and mining, scooping up properties and resources. He boldly claimed to be sitting on $2.3 trillion in assets, including top grade coal, gold, iron ore and a potential 10 billion barrels of oil.

Of course, living in floodlights had its inconveniences. Last year, when Batista’s 20-year-old son Thor, driving a fancy gull wing Mercedes Benz, struck and killed a cyclist on a Rio highway, the media frenzy turned the tragedy into a tropical version of Bonfire of the Vanities . Feeding the script were the facts that Thor was on his father’s payroll, had racked up a fistful of fines for traffic violations, and that the victim was a bricklayer. Batista’s lawyers blamed the accident on the cyclist’s imprudence but, quickly agreed to pay a generous, undisclosed fee to the victim’s family. In June, Thor was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Still, Eike was just the kind of benefactor Brazil ached for: superrich, conscientious and an enthusiastic backer of the arts and worthy causes. “The Eike story played well,” says Alberto Ramos, an emerging market analyst at Goldman Sachs. “There was a narrative that made him more magical, a symbol of the new Brazil, a big emerging, global player.”

Batista’s image got a material bump in early 2012, when his wells in the vaunted Tubarão field, in the southeast Atlantic, started pumping their first barrels of crude. By March, the company had raised about $500 in the bond market, halting a worrying slide in share prices. His cluster of Xs was Brazil’s hottest buy on the bourse. Forbes lifted him to eighth place on its roster of fat cats.

But the expected offshore oil gusher never happened. As it turned out, OGX had vastly overstated its oil reserves. By August 2013, the company announced its prize cache was producing just 17,000 barrels a day, about a third of the yearend target. Investors bolted and by late October, with OGX bleeding top executives and trading at pennies per share, Batista filed for bankruptcy.

Soaring success followed by collapse is nothing new to the business world. Yet Batista’s debacle turned heads. For many Latin America watchers, the fall of this entrepreneurial wunderkind was a body blow to Brazil itself. Not only had a big man stumbled, but the country he so daringly represented also seemed diminished by his woes. After all, authorities in Brasilia had made a point of touting Eike as the new face of Brazilian business, a mogul who took risks but also worked closely with the government to boost national development. Batista was a frequent guest of president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “He deserves our respect,” said Lula’s successor, president Dilma Rousseff, posing alongside the favored tycoon, both dressed in matching oilman’s overhauls on a deep sea rig.

Batista’s success stoked patriotism. Here, after all, was a homegrown mogul, who thrived in a market dominated by giant state oil companies and multinational majors, like Chevron and Exxon. “There was a deliberate effort to forge a national champion,” says former finance minister Mailson da Nóbrega. “Eike was drafted into the role.”

He was also a Cinderella story for the media, eager for a popular idol who didn’t wear football cleats or strut the catwalks. A national newsmagazine splashed him on its cover in a photo montage wearing a beret and a Chinese work jacket: “Eike Xiaoping” read the cover line. The National Development Bank, BNDES, gave him generous loans subsidized by taxpayers.

That deference might explain the eagerness to overlook some of Batista’s failings. “Among energy experts there was plenty of talk about how Eike was overselling his hand, but no one said anything in public,” says Jean-Paul Prates, chief of Expetro, an oil and gas consultancy. “Everyone likes a winner and no one wanted to say the king had no clothes.” The result, says Prates, was “the biggest sham in the country’s recent economic history.”

Not that Batista was conniving to play investors or that Brazilian officials groomed him to lure foreign capital. “Batista was no Mike Milliken [the junk bond trader, convicted of securities racketeering]. This was not Enron, where a company was deliberately defrauding the markets,” says Nóbrega. “The problem was a failure of corporate governance. Eike was allowed to operate without the proper financial anchors.”

In some ways, this was a disaster waiting to happen. Brazil rightly prides itself for having kept tight reins on consumer credit and for its vigilant capital market, virtues that helped the country avoid the bubbles that took down the global financial markets. But the long-sheltered economy is just getting used to the rigors of the globalized market—not least in the oil business, which in Brazil is dominated by a single, state owned giant, Petrobras.

“Brazilian capital markets have little experience overseeing private players,” says Prates. The same goes for the oil and gas regulator, the National Petroleum Agency, which lacks the technical expertise to vet discoveries or evaluate the commercial viability of wells. “Our market isn’t just young, it’s in its infancy,” says Prates. “This reflects poorly on Brazil, which comes off as an immature market. The next time there’s a public stock offering in the oil sector, investors are going to think twice.”

Others are not so sure. “The oil industry is risky business,” says Goldman Sachs’ Ramos. “Sometimes you drill and the wells come up dry. It happens and it’s not necessarily bad management.”

For Brazil, mercifully, the lasting damage may ultimately be limited. “The collapse of Batista’s conglomerate was a shock test for Brazil,” says Nobrega. “There was no earthquake in the markets. No banks are likely to go under. Years ago, a bankruptcy the size of Batista’s might have caused all hell to break lose, maybe even a credit crisis. That shows maturity.”

That may be a small comfort to the man who made and lost $28 billion in a heartbeat. But the fact that a giant fell but barely wobbled this country on the rise is already a victory of sorts.

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Eike Batista: Brazilian mogul hopes to rebuild his billion-pound empire by offering gold to the Queen of the Sea

Mr batista, who admits to being highly superstitious, was told by a brazilian-african religious leader he needed to appease the water-bound deity, yemanja, for his past 'ungrateful' actions, article bookmarked.

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Once the richest man in Brazil, Eike Batista is claimed to have resorted to one of the oldest superstitious rituals in the world in the hope of rebuilding his billion-pound empire, throwing money into the biggest wishing well he could find – the South Atlantic Ocean.

The flamboyant businessman, who suffered one of the largest personal and financial collapses in corporate history, tossed over 700,000 Brazilian reais (£130,000) in gold coins into the waves off the coast off Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema beach last month after a Brazilian-African religious leader told him he needed to appease a water-bound deity, Yemanja, known as Queen of the Sea, for his past “ungrateful” actions.

“He came to me for help and I told him that everything he had taken from the sea has to be returned in some way and this could be done by a ritualistic gesture showing gratitude,” said Ubirajara Pinheiro, a mystic and a priest of the Umbanda religion – a syncretic polytheistic belief that draws on African spiritual traditions mixed with elements of Roman Catholicism. “You cannot remove ore from the earth without thanking and giving back,” warned Mr Pinheiro, who has been a practising mystic for more than 30 years.

In 2013, Mr Batista lost 99 per cent of his estimated net wealth of £25bn when his six-company commodities empire, which included offshore gas and oil exploration, and gold and iron ore mining, went bust, defaulting on the largest corporate debt in the history of Latin America. But Mr Batista, who admits to being highly superstitious and using psychics in the past to guide his businesses, believes he will make a comeback.

Chartering a yacht, he is said to have gone to sea to perform a ceremony that involved placing the gold coins in a small vessel with flowers, perfume, champagne and a statue of Yemanja. The little boat was then pushed off as Mr Pinheiro led prayers, meditation and chanting.

Asked if this is an expensive way to make amends, Mr Pinheiro, who is based in Rio, said: “It is not about the quantity, it is a matter of faith. Many years ago when [Eike] visited my house I warned him what would happen.”

But Mr Batista’s gesture comes at a difficult time as Brazil plunges into its worst recession in over two decades. Unemployment is rising, consumer confidence is down, and in the past year the Brazilian real has lost 24 per cent of its value against the dollar. In 2011, the country overtook the UK as the world’s sixth-largest economy, with huge oil reserves and massive foreign investment. But the bubble burst in late 2014, exacerbated by the state-controlled oil firm Petrobras’s money-laundering and corruption scandal.

Analysts predict Brazil’s economy will contract by 3.33 per cent this year. In February, Moody’s Investors Service followed two other major credit rating agencies and downgraded Brazil’s sovereign debt to junk territory. But Mr Batista remains optimistic.

In an interview with Brazilian network RedeTV! in June 2015, Mr Batista revealed he is rebuilding his company and had “zeroed his debts”. He declined to comment when approached by The Independent .

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Police seized 'negative billionaire' Eike Batista's yacht too

Portia crowe   .

REUTERS/Fred Prouser

Eike Batista

Now they've taken things a step further and seized his water toys too - including jet skis, a speedboat, and his yacht, the Spirit of Brazil, $4 .

This comes after Batista's oil company, OGX, lost $9.7 billion and went bankrupt in 2013, pulling his own net worth down to about $200 million.

Then Batista $4 for insider trading and stock manipulation.

Batista's yacht, the Spirit of Brazil

The story is, Batista started to suspect that OGX's oil fields wouldn't deliver, and personally guaranteed $1 billion to keep things running.

It was enough to stabilize the plunging stock.

Then, prosecutors say, Batista made his move: when suspicions were confirmed and things really started to look bleak for the company, he allegedly sold his own stock and abandoned his $1 billion promise.

Now, four of Batista's companies are bankrupt and he reportedly owes $1.2 billion.

NOW WATCH: $4

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Police seized 'negative billionaire' eike batista's yacht too.

REUTERS/Fred Prouser 'Negative billionaire' Eike Batista.

Last week Brazilian police raided the home of once multibillionaire, now negative billionaire , Eike Batista. They froze his assets and took his Lamborghini, as well as six other cars, some fancy watches, and a pile of cash.

Now they've taken things a step further and seized his water toys too – including jet skis, a speedboat, and his yacht, the Spirit of Brazil, Bloomberg reported .

This comes after Batista's oil company, OGX, lost $9.7 billion and went bankrupt in 2013, pulling his own net worth down to about $200 million.

Then Batista went on trial for insider trading and stock manipulation.

EBX via The Bloomberg Billionaires Index Batista's yacht, the Spirit of Brazil.

The story is, Batista started to suspect that OGX's oil fields wouldn't deliver, and personally guaranteed $1 billion to keep things running.

It was enough to stabilize the plunging stock.

Then, prosecutors say, Batista made his move: when suspicions were confirmed and things really started to look bleak for the company, he allegedly sold his own stock and abandoned his $1 billion promise.

Now, four of Batista's companies are bankrupt and he reportedly owes $1.2 billion.

NOW WATCH: This Billionaire's Definition Of Success Will Surprise You

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Brazilian police posted pictures of 'negative billionaire' Eike Batista's impounded Lamborghini on the internet

Eike Batista is now a 'negative billionaire'

There's a new king of private equity

The rise and spectacular fall of Brazilian ex-billionaire Eike Batista

This article was published more than 9 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

As he was climbing the ranks of the world’s richest people a few years ago, the Brazilian entrepreneur Eike Batista vowed to bring a long-lost pride back to Rio de Janeiro, his adopted hometown – saying it would once more be the “city of the sun,” a new world hub.

Today the sun still shines in Rio, but Mr. Batista holds the grim distinction of being the planet’s most indebted person, out 99 per cent of a $34.5-billion (U.S.) fortune, and the city he pledged to remake is littered with the debris of his shattered ambitions.

The once-iconic Hotel Gloria, which he bought and pledged to restore to grandeur for the 2016 Olympics, is shuttered and decaying. The polluted lake in the heart of the city that he promised to rehabilitate lies rank and fetid in the summer heat. Dozens of police cars he bought for a project to bring security to favelas sit idle, with no one to buy gas or maintain them. At his former corporate headquarters, front windows are splintered and no one has bothered to fix the glass.

Mr. Batista’s epic rise in recent years paralleled that of his country, the hottest emerging market. Now Brazilians are hoping that their nation, tipping into recession and beset by inflation, will not similarly parallel his fall.

“Two years ago Eike was Mr. Brazil – well, Mr. Brazil is a fraud, so what does Brazil have to offer now?” said a former director of his companies who worked closely with Mr. Batista for 14 years, and quit as the bankruptcies mounted. Because the case is before the court, and he faces scrutiny, he was not willing to be speak on the record.

Brazilians are watching in grim fascination as Mr. Batista’s life falls apart. Last week, police repossessed the white Lamborghini he kept in his living room, along with watches and a piano from the palatial home where he now lives a reclusive life. This week they seized his yacht, while his ex-wife had a screaming fit outside the walls of his mansion, saying she was moving back in since police were taking away her assets, too.

Mr. Batista, 58, is not just spectacularly broke: he is on trial for collusion, insider training, money-laundering and “crimes against the financial market,” and legal experts say he stands a good chance of being the first person ever to go to jail for financial crimes in Brazil.

Mr. Batista has denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer, Sergio Bermudes, declined repeated requests for an interview. The case is expected to go on for years, in Brazil’s infamously slow legal system.

Mr. Batista’s father, a Brazilian businessman, married a German woman while studying in Hamburg. A widely respected figure in Brazil’s industrial development, he went on to become president of the mining giant Vale and served as Minister of Mines and Energy. Mr. Batista was born and spent his early years in central Brazil but moved to Germany when he was 12, and studied metallurgical engineering there, although he did not complete college.

At 22 he returned to Brazil and, as he has told the story, borrowed $500,000 from contacts to go to the Amazon where he bought gold from artisanal miners who panned it in the river beds and abandoned mines, and then sold the gold back in the city for vastly higher prices. He made millions fast, and used it to start buying mines of his own, in partnerships with connections of his father’s, he has said.

In 1983, Mr. Batista and backers took over a small Canadian mining company called Treasure Valley, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They renamed it TVX: Mr. Batista’s firms always had an X in the name, to signify the multiplication of wealth. He presided over international expansion as CEO, but poor management and a sharp drop in the price of gold wiped out 96 per cent of the company’s value and it was eventually sold off.

Mr. Batista, however, showed a remarkable ability to persuade investors – both private and institutional – to sign on to his schemes. He set out to chart a new course at a pivotal moment for Brazil, with a commodities boom and market liberalization pushing a huge economic expansion.

In 2001 he built a thermal power plant in northern Brazil, the first project of an energy company called MPX. In 2005, he founded MMX, his mining firm, feeding the Chinese appetite for iron ore, and held a public offering a year later. In 2007 he launched the petroleum firm OGX, with backing from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and took it public the next year. He started companies to provide logistics and services to his extractive businesses, and invested nearly $2-billion to build a giant port complex that was to be the centrepiece of a redevelopment of Rio.

“This was something new in Brazil – all of these IPOs,” said the former director of Mr. Batista’s holding company. Brazil’s stock exchange is relatively tiny, with the same number of companies as that of Mongolia.

All along the way Mr. Batista boasted of his close ties to government – and was photographed with the president and governors and celebrities – and lived large, cutting an ostentatious figure of swashbuckling wealth. He anchored an enormous yacht in the Rio harbour and won a number of international titles racing speed boats from his collection. By 2012 he was the seventh wealthiest person in the world, according to the Forbes list, and talked confidently of when he would be Number One. He showered his largesse on the city, funding a children’s hospital and sponsoring sports and cultural events.

Except, says the former executive in the holding company EBX, it wasn’t actually his money: The donations were made in the name of OGX and other companies. “He didn’t do anything with his own money: He spent other people’s,” he said.

The story of Mr. Batista’s unravelling, in essence, is this: He bet big on the “pre-salt” oil fields 200 kilometres off the coast of Rio and more than two kilometres under the sea, raising more than $3-billion from the sale of shares in OGX. But when Mr. Batista began to drill, he didn’t find oil, not on the scale he needed.

Yet he allegedly kept this information to himself, and instead said independent surveyors had asserted that his fields had 10.8 billion barrels of reserves. And the value of his companies rose and rose – until in 2012 OGX’s financial statements made clear that vast sums were being spent on drilling, and very little was coming out of the ground. The share price tanked, and he defaulted on loans.

“His projects made sense at the time – big oil, and then the big port to move it, and the logistics companies,” said Sergio Leo, author of a book on Mr. Batista, The Rise and fall of the Empire of X. “But each company was linked to the success of the other. And the moment OGX failed it went down like a house of cards.”

Soon the X companies were being broken up, sold or ordered into bankruptcy protection. The Ontario teachers fund got out before the carnage, but many minority shareholders were hit hard. “There are lots of arguments he can present to show it was good faith, when he was encouraging people to invest, but it will be difficult to believe because at the same moment he was selling his own shares,” said Mr. Leo. “He knew the company was in bad condition and the fields were not the size publicized, so he knew he would have a big hit in profits. But at the same time he was on Twitter telling people to invest, while he was selling his own shares.”

The former EBX director echoed this assertion, saying he “knows for a fact” that Mr. Batista knew more than a year before it was made public that the oil fields were far less valuable than estimated.

Brazil’s weak financial regulators did not help. “If our regulators were faster probably they could have stopped him before he did so much damage,” said Mr. Leo.

It would be highly unusual for someone with Mr. Batista’s level of privilege to go to jail, and the asset seizures are also unusual for a case involving someone of his social status. Police have so far frozen $1-billion in assets. Last week’s raid on Mr. Batista’s Rio home were covered live on television.

Marcio Lobo, a lawyer who says he lost $25,000 in the bankruptcy of OGX, is representing 60 other minority shareholders in a class action suit against Mr. Batista. New people join the suit every day, he said. “For the first time people are starting to believe in our justice. Before people said he was too rich and too powerful to get our money back. Now they saw police go to his house.”

But some Brazilians have limited sympathy for those who lost money on Batista ventures. “Any Brazilian investor who knew Eike knew he had a screw loose, that he was a lunatic with projects on a crazy scale,” said Ancelmo Gois, the eminence grise of Brazilian columnists who covered the Batista empire closely for years. “Nearly all the victims signed on to play the game with him. They knew what he was.There are no innocents here. There was a carnaval around Eike – champagne and sports cars. It was an orgy, and everyone knew why they were there.”

And Mr. Gois mourns his loss. Brazilian business culture is fatally timid, and chronically dependent on the state, he said, and anyone who succeeds squirrels away profits in their mattress. Mr. Batista, with his breathtaking risks and his flashy success, was different. “I’m not defending him, but his downfall is a huge loss for the city.”

Mr. Batista himself has largely gone to ground. Neighbours in his leafy hilltop neighbourhood say that while he once came and went in a cavalcade of vehicles several times a day, he now leaves in a car with a single body guard, only once or twice a week. “Before this all happened, people would come visit all the time. Businessmen, the governor, the mayor,” said one household employee in the complex, who would not give his name. “Now, after the scandals, no one comes any more.”

Mr. Batista also no longer presides over the dining room of Mr. Lam, an upscale restaurant said to be the favourite of all his acquisitions, where he used to spontaneously pick up the tab for everyone in the room. “He’s working,” said the former EBX director, saying Mr. Batista spends his days trying to hustle up new projects – with partners from Asia, he tells his former employees. “That’s all. He doesn’t have any friends or family.”

In fact Mr. Batista has two sons, Thor and Olin, with his ex-wife Luma de Oliveira, a former Carnaval Queen and Playboy playmate. The sons, 22 and 18, are known for their sports car collections, flying the family jets to DJ parties, and bragging of never having read a book. Their relationship with their father, say former associates of Mr. Batista, is poor. He has a toddler son with a Rio lawyer who now runs a website to sell used designer clothes.

“The truth is I don’t have anything personal against him, I know he’s a father, he has three sons. I’m also a father, I also have sons,” said Mr. Lobo, about the raids. “Having the police come to your home and take your car, take your phone – it’s terrible. But he should have thought of that sooner. He had the opportunity to make things right.”

Mr. Leo, the biographer, said that one cannot compare Mr. Batista’s situation with Brazil’s. “Eike’s situation is irreversible; he will never go back to the good old times,” he said. “Brazil is facing the consequences of bad choices in the past, but it has natural and human resources that will allow us to think about a comeback.”

Brazil’s Eike Batista: From billionaire to bankruptcy

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SAO PAULO, Brazil — A little over a year ago, Brazilian playboy Eike Batista was reputed to be the seventh-richest man in the world and was in the habit of boasting loudly that he’d soon be No. 1. By this week, he had become one of the world’s biggest paupers.

On Wednesday, his flagship oil company, OGX, filed for bankruptcy. A personal fortune once valued at $30 billion had collapsed into a personal debt estimated at more than $800 million. Some Brazilians, long since soured on his cocky persona, responded with glee on social networks to the news that Batista’s yacht, the Pink Fleet, would soon be sold for scrap.

No one wanted, or could afford, the $19-million boat intact.

Batista’s spectacular fall may say more about his personal failings, and what Alan Greenspan called the “irrational exuberance” of the market, than it does about Brazil. It turned out that his much-hyped empire was built on vastly overconfident assumptions — in particular, oil deposit estimates that bore no relationship to reality.

“He ended up swallowed by his own myth,” columnist William Waack wrote for Brazil’s Globo media group.

Still, as Brazil’s economy sinks back to reality after boom-time highs, his implosion has served as a warning to investors, and to Brazilians at large, that much of the fabulous wealth that was on the horizon so recently was based on little more than promises.

Batista “is vain. And at a certain point his vanity prevailed over common sense,” said Adriano Pires, director of the Brazilian Infrastructure Center, an energy consulting firm in Rio de Janeiro. “The case of Batista is not just bad for him and the companies around him, it is very bad for all of Brazil, especially in a moment when we need international investors. He is blemishing Brazil’s credibility a little all around the world.”

Batista grew up the son of Brazil’s wealthy former minister of mines and energy. In a country famous for corruption and nepotism, it seemed a bit more than coincidental when the younger Batista literally struck gold in the mining industry in the 1980s, despite the assertion in his autobiography, characteristically titled “The X Factor: The Path of Brazil’s Greatest Entrepreneur,” that his fortune was the result of hard work and ingenuity.

He acquired government licenses to exploit some of Brazil’s newly discovered offshore oil reserves, and created an interconnected set of energy, mining and logistics companies based around the wells. He cashed in big from international investors, selling stock at a moment when the world believed more than ever in a Brazilian boom and, after the shock of the U.S.-based financial crisis, was looking for a new place to invest.

It was a heady time for Batista and for Brazil. The economy was in rapid expansion, the government was extremely popular, and a rising middle class was euphoric with higher wages. Certifying the country’s ascendance, Brazil was awarded the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

Amid assurances of big gains — each of his companies had the letter X in its title, signifying multiple returns — his personal fortune soared, even as the companies brought in little revenue. After he tapped equities markets for all they were worth, he turned to debt markets, borrowing even more to pump up his companies.

“He built his empire based on what have now been proven to be very unrealistic expectations,” said Tony Volpon, a New York-based economist for international bank Nomura Securities. “He made the cardinal sin of using debt to finance what were very risky exploratory activities in oil, and no one does that.”

“He didn’t understand that oil and gas projects are high-risk ventures,” said Pires, of the energy consulting firm. “In this business there is no certainty, just probability. He went around preaching and promising.”

Batista branched out into luxury hotels, rock festivals, restaurants, soccer and ultimate fighting, all without much economic logic behind them, Pires added.

Things began to fall apart last year in dramatic fashion. His bodybuilder son, Thor, struck and killed a cyclist while speeding in a million-dollar Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren that the Batistas had been in the habit of keeping on display in their living room. The public was shocked by Eike Batista’s response, as he took to Twitter to blame the “carelessness” of the cyclist, an impoverished cargo worker who had to commute by bike on a dangerous highway.

Soon after, it became clear that some OGX wells wouldn’t hit production targets, and the money began to fall away. Batista again took to Twitter, this time to attack those who didn’t believe in him.

After deposits he valued at more than a trillion dollars turned out to be woefully small this year, his company lost more than 96% of its value and has been unable to pay back creditors. Brazil’s state-run banks, which had supported Batista’s companies, backed away.

Though analysts put the lion’s share of the blame on Batista, he sold his projects to investors who were willing to believe him. Brazil seemed to be experiencing a once-in-a-generation moment when its deep social and infrastructure problems were forgotten. Stock investments were soaring across the board as the value of Brazil’s currency was pushed up to what economists warned were unsustainably high levels.

After growing more than 7% in 2010, Brazil’s economy nearly ground to a halt in 2012. Then the social questions again came to the fore in what is one of the world’s most unequal countries. Though inequality dropped dramatically and most Brazilians are better off than ever — the economy is expected to rebound modestly this year, wages continue to rise, and unemployment is still low — the ruling Workers’ Party, during its decade in power, has not invested in much-needed transportation, healthcare or education to adequately satisfy the demands of a new and dynamic middle class.

After a police crackdown on a protest against a bus fare hike, protesters with wide public support filled the streets in June, demanding better public services, and demonstrators still take aim at symbols of capitalist excess. Among the targets of their rage have been the windows of Batista’s office building.

Batista’s fall seems, at least to some, to be a reflection of Brazil’s torn social fabric.

“I never liked Eike, since I don’t believe it’s possible to get so rich like that, especially in Brazil today, without infringing on the rights of the poorest,” said Erica Alves, a 26-year-old teacher from Rio de Janeiro who is active in left-wing organizations. “He became rich ‘winning’ rights from the government to exploit the country’s resources. I wasn’t surprised by his fall, because fast and easy wealth can’t be sustained.”

In Brazil’s new, more austere and more politically conscious moment, Eike Batista has had little to say. His once-active Twitter account has been dormant for 126 days.

Bevins is a special correspondent.

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From billions to bust: where did it go wrong for Eike Batista?

“watch, i’ll be the world’s richest” were the famous last words of eike batista. two years later, his business ventures have taken a devastating turn for the worse.

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“I’m not bragging. It’s just a consequence of all the things that we have done. Just look at the assets. Jesus, by 2015 we will be making $10bn. Between 2015 and 2020 that will double, or triple. And those are discounted numbers I’m giving you.” Eike Batista’s modesty might not have shone through in his now infamous interview with the Sunday Times in March 2012, but his confidence certainly did. He was then Brazil’s richest man, the fourth richest person in the world and on a mission to the top. What a difference two years make.

In the intervening time, Batista lost most of his $30bn and tumbled right off any rich list he once appeared on. Batista’s white-knuckle ride of ostentation and loss culminated with OGX, his once celebrated oil-and-gas company and the cornerstone of his empire, filing for bankruptcy this past November, after missing $45m worth of payments to bondholders.

Though he still heads another four listed companies in energy, ship building, mining and logistics, Batista’s unconventional set-up and management style means that even the profitable parts of his sprawling businesses are likely to face the axe as a direct consequence of OGX’s failure.

Building something from nothing Batista has been a ‘celebrity millionaire’ in Brazil for the past 30 years. Known for his extravagant taste, exuberant (and public) family life, and unrepentant ambition, Batista became the face of Brazil’s emergence as an economic powerhouse over the last two decades. In many ways Batista’s success was symbolic of what Brazil could be, with just a little bit of hard work.

His father was a prominent businessman who once headed Vale do Rio Doce and served as Minister for Mines and Energy in the 1960s and then the 1980s, but his children were raised by his estranged wife in Germany. As the youngest, Eike abandoned an engineering degree in Aanchen to try his luck in Brazil, and by the age of 25 he had made $6m by buying and selling gold. He married a model, bought a very big boat and started growing his business.

Batista made his real money in mining in the 1990s. Since 2004 he listed five successful companies under the EBX (Eike Batista X) umbrella: MPX in energy generation; MMX in mining; LLX in logistics; OSX in shipbuilding; and of course OGX. Batista once boasted to Brasil Econômico, that “the ‘X’ represents multiplication”, referring, of course, to his assets.

Batista’s troubles can be traced back to the launch of OGX in 2008, though they would only reveal themselves much later

The companies, excluding OGX, and a handful of other international holdings including a mining operation in Colombia, were virtually multiplying in size and value each month for much of the mid to late 2000s. In 2009 alone, EBX shares were up by 195 percent; LLX had gained 500 percent and Batista’s reputation as Brazil’s golden boy was solidified.

Batista’s troubles can be traced back to the launch of OGX in 2008, though they would only reveal themselves much later. The oil and gas company was launched and listed on the basis that it would explore prospects around Brazil, but without any actual fields in operation. It was always a risky proposition, but Batista had assembled a reputable team of experts behind his project, all ex-Petrobras with a wealth of experience in drilling in Brazil.

Batista was riding the slipstream of the discovery of Brazil’s enormous ultra-deep-sea crude oil reserves, known as the Pré-Sal region off the southeast coast of the country. OGX’s IPO raised $3.7bn and was Brazil’s biggest ever IPO at the time.

But in 2012, news broke that OGX was slashing production in what had been touted as its biggest oil asset off the Rio de Janeiro coast. It soon became apparent that for all of Batista’s skilled sales pitch, there was nothing supporting the hype of OGX. When the company announced it would be winding down production by 2015, it was producing 10,000 barrels of crude a day – barely a fifth of what it had promised in the IPO prospectus five years earlier. Shares tumbled by 99 percent and bonds were being traded at eight percent of their face value. However, that was just the beginning of Batista’s problems.

In the five years between OGX going public and then going bust, Batista seemed to be caught up in what can only be described now, with the benefit of hindsight, as unbridled megalomania. He had extended himself from energy production to flashy – and expensive – entertainment and hospitality ventures. At one point an EBX subsidiary was bidding for the Maracanã stadium concession, had won the contract to renovate and run a historic hotel in downtown Rio and was running the Rock in Rio festival, a ten-day party that brings the biggest names in pop music to Brazil.

These showy enterprises not only lost Batista a lot of money when it eventually became apparent they were being frightfully mismanaged, but they also lost him a lot of standing with the Brazilian public, who stopped thinking of him as an aspirational figure and started seeing him as something of an ostentatious show-off.

Overestimated assets As OGX started to unravel, Batista’s almost risible capitalisation strategy became apparent; and the ultimate demise of EBX became a chronicle of a death foretold. Batista had relied heavily on government support, not only in terms when bidding for concessions, but also in investment through the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES).

As of October 31, the bank stood to lose up to BRL 6bn, around $2.61bn of direct investment and financing of EBX projects. EBX’s main companies were all built upon the same foundations: the opportunity to profit from Brazil’s exuberant mineral reserves by investing in the infrastructure that the government would be unable to build itself.

Batista was building ports, ships, energy infrastructure and mines; all of his companies were interconnected, MMX’s mining products would be shipped from LLX’s multi-use port, which would also be used as an oil hub for OGX’s products, and so on. When OGX and its billions of dollars worth of debt came crashing down, it dragged down the whole lot of them.

He built a $30bn house of cards by persuading investors, banks and the Brazilian government that his superstructure of companies could be the answer to all of Brazil’s infrastructure needs

Batista started his business life peddling insurance door-to-door, and his salesmanship is undeniable. He built a $30bn house of cards by persuading investors, banks and the Brazilian government that his superstructure of companies could be the answer to all of Brazil’s infrastructure needs.

He sold a dream. However, by 2012 it was obvious that the man lacked the management skill to make that dream function past the sales pitch. Batista had not only built his conglomerate in such a way that his main companies relied heavily on each other to succeed, but he also severely leveraged OGX, by far his most ambitious enterprise, on his other, already successful companies. When OGX announced it was suspending operations, Batista was leveraged up to his ears.

In June, Batista, seeing EBX on the verge of collapse, took out a full page editorial in the O Globo and the Valor newspapers. Though described by the local media as a mea culpa of sorts, in which he confronted headfirst the perception that he benefited “from a rampant wave of capital building, that [he surfed] on a wave of an inflated market, that without any apparent reason, offered him a blank cheque with a few billion with which to play at being an entrepreneur.”

However, though he admitted this is how he has come to be seen by the market and the public, the editorial did nothing to disabuse any one of those opinions. Batista boldly placed the blame for OGX’s shortcomings on the ranks of executives he had drafted in from other oil and gas companies to help him develop the company, who he all but accuses of having over-inflated expectations with their optimistic analysis of the market and the company itself. “I was as surprised as any of my investors, collaborators and the market,” he wrote, referring to the losses accrued by OGX.

“More than anything I ask myself where I have erred,” he continued. “What should I have done differently? The first issue is probably linked to the financing model I chose for my companies.” Batista suggests that by relying on the stock market he condemned his companies to failure. He admits to being too eager: “If I could turn back time, I would not have resorted to the stock market. I would have structured private equity that would have allowed me to build the companies from zero and develop them each over 10 years.”

Though Batista is not wrong when he identifies his financing model as a major factor contributing to the undoing of his empire, his inability to take responsibility over the mismanagement of his many investments is worrying. Though he has managed to sell off the least damaged of the ‘X’ companies – LLX was bought by EIG Global Energy Partners, MMX was sold to Trafigura, a Dutch commodity trader and Mubadala, Abu-Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, and MPX was bought by E.ON and renamed Eneva. The Colombian coalmines are also being sold. But there are billions of dollars in debts to service, and the rest of his smaller enterprises continue to struggle.

Throughout the collapse of OGX and the subsequent quartering of EBX, it became increasingly apparent that for all of Batista’s confidence, his enthusiastic showmanship, his jolly arrogance and ostentatious lifestyle, deep down he remained the door-to-door peddler of his youth. He was a good salesman, but his shortcomings as manager and executive made his downfall.

He was a good salesman, but his shortcomings as manager and executive made his downfall

Batista is now facing a lengthy legal struggle against his creditors as he tries to limit losses. EBX is on full damage control mode now; they have filed a number of suits with the Brazilian justice system in an attempt to stay off bankruptcy and avoid trouble with the creditors, all of which remain unresolved.

Batista’s personal fortune, once estimated at $34bn, has dwindled to around $200m; three of his private jets and a helicopter have been sold. It is unclear how Batista will manage to extricate himself from the tangle of debts and collapsing contracts he has woven around himself, but it will take years before he can truly move on from this disaster. Perhaps he should have taken note of the old maxim: Jack of all trades, master of none.

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The spectacular fall of Eike Batista

Just last year, Brazilian Eike Batista was one of the richest people on the planet. But no longer - the oil baron fell victim to his own megalomania.

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If Brazil's Eike Batista was a superstitious man, he might "track the start of his spectacular fall from grace to one night in March last year", says the Financial Times.

His eldest son, Thor, 20, appeared on the news in a blood-spattered T-shirt, having run over and killed a migrant worker while speeding in his father's Mercedes. "Though it had nothing to do with business, the horrific accident was a bad omen": soon after, one of the largest fortunes on the planet began evaporating.

A year ago, Batista was worth $34bn and boasting of soon being the world's richest man. "He seemed the perfect emblem for the new Brazil," says The Daily Beast. "Tough, frighteningly ambitious, politically savvy and willing to take outsized risks." What a fall.

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The oil baron, 57, has just notched up the largest corporate default in Latin American history following the bankruptcy of his oil firm, OGX Petroleo. He now reportedly has no more to his name than an $800m debt.

The upstart oil giant had enticed investors and borrowed big on hopes of finding an "underwater goldmine" in Brazil's offshore fields, says Forbes. Now an empire spanning logistics, shipping and entertainment is "sinking like a platform torpedoed on all four legs", taking investors with it.

Once the pin-up entrepreneur of the ruling Workers' Party, Batista boasted his "idiot-proof" companies could never fail. These days he is shunned as the personification of Brazil's economic hangover (see below).

Those who fell for the former powerboat racing champion's bravado have only themselves to blame, says the FT. There were abundant clues to a certain wildness and eccentricity.

The son of a German-born mother and a former Brazilian mining minister (who doubled as boss of mining group Vale), he read metallurgical engineering at Aachen before returning to prospect for gold in the Amazon .

Batista likens himself to a bandeirante the tough 16th-century adventurers who explored Brazil's interior and he recounts incidents involving guns. But he claims the venture made his first fortune.

Batista expanded his mining business into Chile, Canada and Russia (he says he was kicked out by the Mafia), realising $1bn when he sold out of his Canadian gold venture in 2000.

But his big break came when he formed OGX to exploit the promised riches of Brazil's offshore oil wells.The hype was so great that when the OGX floated in 2008, it was valued at around $20bn. It hadn't even started drilling.

Great wealth encouraged Batista's grandiose tendencies. There was uproar in 1998 when his ex-wife was photographed wearing a dog-collar emblazoned "Eike", and he named all his sons after Norse gods.

"I've been painted as a megalomaniac, as someone who is vain, proud," he wrote in his autobiography. "My response to these accusations is that none of these things is a defect or anything reproachable." He's got a bit more time to think about that now.

The salesman who believed his own pitch

When Bloomberg visited in 2008, it reported: "A typical 20 minutes in his company might involve him picking a colour scheme for his yacht's upholstery (pink and white), ordering an aide to sell $200m of shares, or getting a phone briefing on an upscale Chinese restaurant he owns in Rio."

Batista's star has now fallen so low that he can't even find a buyer for his $19m yacht, which is going for scrap, says Vincent Bevins in the Los Angeles Times. He's been hung out to dry by Dilma Rousseff's government.

While the implosion of his empire is a PR catastrophe for Brazil, there has been no attempt at rescue. Doubtless the government is embarrassed that it fell for Batista's blarney, which included putting an X in the title of every company he owned to signify its inevitable multiplication of wealth, says Wyre Davies on BBC.co.uk.

Yet his downfall leaves a big hole. He was "one of the biggest backers of Rio's regeneration ahead of the 2016 Olympics".

The "self-appointed salesman of Brazil" made the mistake of believing his own pitch, says Joe Leahy in the FT. Many reckon he'll bounce back, but his fall puts the governing Workers' Party in a dilemma.

"Batista's loud form of capitalism served for a while to disguise the government's statism." Without the fig leaf he provided, Brasilia must now decide: "can markets... be trusted, or will letting investors have their way... lead to more Batistas?"

Still, there's a silver lining to everything. At a conference last year, Batista presented his son Thor, a bodybuilder, as his successor. "He knows his most important task is to preserve what was created, so he has to carry some heavy sh*t in the future," he said. It seems Thor's task is getting lighter every day.

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