Friday, November 01, 2013

The Downfall of Eike Batista

Eike Batista, once the richest man in Brazil and the eighth-richest man in the world, prepares for bankruptcy. He'd borrowed billions to fund exploration of offshore oil deposits, whose value he'd estimated at a trillion dollars.

I'll post a lot more on this, but as the article says:

Batista and OGX had to admit that their much-hyped “new frontier” of oil off the Brazilian coast was actually a collection of mediocre-to-dud oil wells. Production would come nowhere close to paying off the billions he had borrowed in the bond market to finance exploration and production.

At one point Batista was worth $34.5 billion but has since lost $30 billion! He still has several hundreds of millions of dollars.

60 Minutes segment from December 2010:



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