O mais chato disso tudo não é o descenso do companheiro capitalista, é a súbita interrupção de gordas mesadas chegando não se sabe bem de onde...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
GLOBAL INSIGHT
Fall of Brazil’s Batista embarrasses President Dilma Rousseff
By Joe Leahy in São Paulo
Financial Times, November 4, 2013 1:37 pm
There must be moments in every politician’s career that make them cringe when recalling later on.
For Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff one of these is probably the day in April last year when she helped failed entrepreneur Eike Batista commemorate the “first oil” from what are now his failed fields off the coast of Rio de Janeiro.
The Brazilian president said a number of things that day praising Mr Batista, who was then still the country’s richest man with a fortune estimated at more than $30bn invested in a network of oil, mining, energy and logistics companies, most of them start-ups.
But probably most embarrassing in hindsight was her encouragement of an alliance between his tiny flagship oil company, OGX, and Brazil’s state-owned giant, Petrobras, a world-renowned expert in deepwater exploration.
“They can both gain a lot from a partnership between them,” she said at the time.
That was the peak of the relationship between Mr Batista and the government. Since then, his fall has been so swift and so high profile with his filing for bankruptcy last week that Brasília has done its best to avoid the fallout. A call to the president’s palace about Mr Batista’s travails last week returned a flat “no comment”.
The fall of Mr Batista, who in many ways was the “pet” entrepreneur of the ruling centre-left Workers’ Party (PT) government, raises questions about its future policy direction. Mr Batista’s rise gave credibility to the PT’s claims that its statist economic policies were simultaneously market friendly. Will his fall make the party more or less interventionist?
The answer will be critical to Brazil’s future prosperity. The government’s relative silence on Mr Batista’s collapse has been a surprise to some who had thought the former powerboat champion’s “X” business empire was too big to fail. More probably, Brasília realised early on that Mr Batista’s house of cards was too precarious to save.
The collapse was sparked by OGX, the oil company, which admitted its only producing fields were duds. This left it with almost no cash to service its more than $5bn in debt and that of the web of companies higher up in his labyrinthine corporate structure.
The government had a front-row seat for the catastrophe. Brazil’s development bank, the BNDES, extended credit lines to the group worth about R$10bn. BNDES president Luciano Coutinho sought to explain the collapse as an accident of the type that can occur in any market.
“Capital markets know how to differentiate these things and they know that accidents can occur anywhere in the world,” Mr Coutinho said.
Guido Mantega, finance minister, took the same approach. “It’s a private group. It has no connection with the government and therefore the solution to OGX will come from the market,” he said.
Yet while the solution may be market-based – in the sense that investors have lost billions of dollars and are now facing a difficult court-ordered debt restructuring – the government will be doing some soul-searching over whether it was part of the problem.
One of the sources of confidence in OGX was the implication that Mr Batista’s connections meant he had the implicit backing of the government. For one thing, his father is a respected former mines minister. His companies had the investment from BNDES – Mr Batista once described it as “the best bank in the world” – and the senior management team of OGX was poached from Petrobras. In addition to this, he was regularly pictured with senior politicians at the federal and state levels and was a large donor to the Rio de Janeiro police.
“The rich are the ones who have gained most under my government,” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian president and PT founder, once said.
The implication was that Brazil, in spite of being run by a socialist government, was very much open for business. Since Mr Lula da Silva’s chosen successor, Ms Rousseff, took over, however, the government has been seen as more interventionist and suspicious of a private sector it views as profiteering.
Mr Batista’s loud form of capitalism served for a while to disguise the government’s statism. He presented to the world the caricature of a Brazilian entrepreneur with his fast cars, a former carnival queen wife, and a house overlooking Rio’s beaches.
To its credit, the government let him fail. But now without the fig leaf he provided, Brasília will have to decide. Can markets really be trusted or will letting investors have their way merely lead to more Batistas?
Given the embarrassment of celebrating the first of Mr Batista’s oil that never came, it is hard to see Ms Rousseff giving the markets the benefit of the doubt.
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