Brazilian police have issued an arrest warrant for a businessman famous for amassing and then losing a multibillion-dollar fortune, the latest person caught up in a wide-ranging corruption investigation roiling Latin America’s largest country.
Federal police were working with Interpol to locate Eike Batista, who may be in New York. Batista’s lawyer Fernando Martins told the G1 news portal that his client was travelling and would surrender to police.
Batista – who was once Brazil’s richest man – is being sought for allegedly paying bribes to the former Rio de Janeiro state governor, Sérgio Cabral, apparently to gain an advantage in government contracts.
Tácio Muzzi, an inspector with the federal police, told a news conference that if Batista did not turn himself in soon, he would be considered a fugitive from justice. He did not give a specific deadline. He added that Batista appeared to have used his German passport to leave Brazil.
Police learned overnight that Batista might be out of the country, Muzzi said, but decided to go ahead with attempting to execute the warrant. Globo Television showed images of police going to Batista’s home in Rio de Janeiro early on Thursday.
Prosecutor Eduardo El Hage told reporters that Batista paid $16.5m to Cabral in foreign bank accounts. Officials said on Thursday that they were still investigating what the money was for.
Cabral is also facing several corruption charges and was jailed last year.
The warrant for Batista was one of nine issued on Thursday in connection with an investigation into the money laundering and the hiding of about $100m in foreign bank accounts. The vast majority of that money, nearly $80m, belonged to Cabral, said prosecutor Leonardo Freitas. He held out the possibility that the conspiracy could be even larger.
“The wealth of the members of the criminal organization led by Mr Sérgio Cabral is an ocean not yet completely mapped,” he told reporters.
The inquiry is among many that make up Brazil’s so-called Car Wash case, a sprawling investigation into the cozy relationship between politicians and businessmen, including the payment of billions of dollars in bribes. The focus of the investigation is on allegedly inflated contracts with the state oil giant, Petrobras, and other state-run companies that yielded billions of dollars for bribes and election campaigns. It has spawned hundreds of cases and caught up some of the country’s top businessmen and top politicians.
Batista has already experienced a fall from grace.
In 2011, he was listed by Forbes magazine as the world’s eighth-richest person and had boasted he would take the top spot away from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. By 2013, his fortune had crumbled amid debts in his various energy sector companies. At one point, he was $1bn in debt.
Batista’s riches-to-rags story was widely seen as a symbol of Brazil’s own economic troubles. After years of surging growth, the Brazilian economy is now in a protracted recession.