In Brazilian financial circles 17 May 2017 is dubbed “Joesley Day”. It’s the date when the power and influence of Brazil’s meat industry was exposed in all its ugly glory and gave the stock market a sucker punch.
It was the date that Joesley Batista, at that point one of the controllers of the world’s biggest meat-packing company, family-run JBS, went to meet then-President Michel Temer, and secretly recorded him endorsing payments to a notoriously corrupt politician imprisoned for political corruption.
News of Batista’s recording, part of a plea bargain deal he and his brother Wesley signed to avert an investigation into corruption themselves, was published by the O Globo newspaper site and caused an uproar.
JBS executive Ricardo Saud subsequently testified that the company had bribed 1,829 political candidates from across the political spectrum. “It was the rule of the game. And what’s most important, corruption was on the upper floor, with the authorities,” Joesley told Época magazine’s Diego Escosteguy. At the time he was CEO of J&F Investimentos, the family empire’s holding company.
The day after Joesley Day, the Brazilian stock market plunged nearly 9%, its worst collapse in nine years. The dollar soared to an 18-year high against the Brazilian real. Temer’s mandate only survived when Congress blocked corruption charges after he agreed to budgets for individual lawmakers’ projects and made concessions to the powerful agribusiness lobby. Since leaving office, he has twice been arrested in a separate corruption probe. Temer denies that he solicited, participated in or authorised the payments to prevent cooperation with justice officials. He currently faces a raft of charges including corruption, money laundering and racketeering – which he denies.
It’s a story that gives a sense of the power of the Brazilian meat tycoons. “The agribusiness sector has always been at the forefront of everything in Brazil and politicians have always needed their support,” said economist Monica de Bolle, director of the Latin American programme at John Hopkins University in the US.
“The sector is very powerful and does not show much will politically to be more transparent,” said Adriana Charoux, a senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil, adding that pasture makes up more than 60% of deforested Amazon areas.
Agribusiness is worth more than a fifth of Brazil’s GDP, one of the few successes in an economy stumbling from one crisis to another. Continent-sized Brazil has perfect conditions for cattle farming and is the world’s biggest beef exporter.
“When you analyse the quality of water, climate, soil, the big advantage is Brazilian,” said Thiago de Carvalho, a professor of rural economy and agribusiness management at the University of São Paulo.
Brazil’s huge meat companies mostly started out as family businesses that transformed into slick multinationals, he said. The giant BRF came out of the 2009 merger between the Perdigão and Sadia companies – both founded in southern Santa Catarina state in the 1930s and 1940s by Italian immigrants and their descendants, who built businesses selling chicken, pork, sausages and ready meals.
Now BRF is weighing up a merger with Marfrig, a beef giant founded by former butcher and salesman Marcos Molina dos Santos in 2000 with a beef processing unit in Bataguassu, a small town in Mato Grosso do Sul. Marfrig grew through buying other companies, including turkey and chicken producers, before buying US beef processor National Beef last year.
JBS, the largest of all, was founded in 1953 when Joesley Batista’s father, José Batista Sobrinho, and uncle Juvensor bought a small slaughterhouse in Anápolis, in Goiás. Three years later, they began supplying meat to workers building the new capital of Brasília. By 2005 the company had begun expanding internationally to become the world’s biggest meat processing company.
From 2008-2013, under Workers’ Party presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, Brazil pushed a “national champions” policy, helping to turn companies into multinationals. The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) extended low-interest loans to the meat tycoons, helping to accelerate their expansion both at home and overseas.
BNDES invested 400m reais (£83m) in the initial public offering for BRF in 2009 – 7.6% of shares – and provided “billions” in financing to Sadia and Perdigão. It put so much money into Marfrig that it now owns a third of the company. Within a few years, with the help of BNDES, the Brazil meat sector would become one of the largest, most powerful in the world. In 2009, the bank injected $2.8bn into JBS as it bought American chicken corporation Pilgrim’s, becoming its single biggest shareholder.
Today Brazil is the world’s second biggest beef and veal producer – behind the US – and produced a record 1.6m tonnes of beef last year, up 11% on 2017 and worth $6.6bn.
In March this year Brazilian prosecutors filed charges against 12 people, including Joesley Batista, arguing that JBS had bribed its way to cheap financing and investments from BNDES. A judge has since accepted financial crimes charges against former BNDES president and finance minister Guido Mantega and former bank president Luciano Coutinho – which both have denied – and three others. Charges against Batista were rejected because of his plea bargain deal.
Carvalho pointed out that JBS was already expanding when it got BNDES funding. It grew because it cut costs and increased efficiency in companies it bought, he said. “Joesley and Wesley understand the business of buying cattle and selling meat.”
JBS’s tumultuous story is told in Why Not, a new book by business reporter Raquel Landim. She described Wesley as a smart manager with a close eye for detail and the more flamboyant Joesley as the risk taker. “Joesley is very intelligent,” she said. “He has no scruples.”
As JBS rose, Joesley bought yachts, a Lamborghini and luxury apartments in New York, and married television presenter Ticiana Villas Boas in a sumptuous ceremony at company headquarters in São Paulo, with performances by Brazilian popstars Ivete Sangalo and Bruno & Marrone.
Joesley Batista’s ego may have got the better of him. He used a cheap device to record Temer and the poor sound quality muddied subsequent legal proceedings. He and JBS executive Ricardo Saud also sabotaged their plea bargain deal when they delivered prosecutors four hours of accidentally recorded, alcohol-fuelled conversation during which Joesley said he could read people’s minds and they inadvertently revealed they’d broken the terms of the deal.
Joesley and Saud were subsequently imprisoned for six months and Brazil’s supreme court has yet to decide whether to revoke their deal or not. Wesley was jailed for nearly six months after both he and Joesley were accused and later charged with insider trading – profiting from selling shares and trading in foreign currency – before their plea bargain deal emerged.
The brothers have since been released but their court cases continue and neither plays an active role in company management. Their companies are close to completing an internal investigation as part of a $2.66bn leniency deal.
And JBS ? It’s thriving: shares are up and its Brazilian profits soared nearly 116% in the first quarter of this year.
