It played a key role in the creative bookkeeping at the heart of the impeachment process against Brazil President Dilma Rousseff. It spearheaded the debt surge that contributed to the country’s loss of investment grade. Its biggest client has been Petrobras, the scandal-plagued state oil company.
BNDES, the huge development bank owned by the Brazilian government, seems to keep turning up in the state’s deepening crisis, as does its chief, Luciano Coutinho, whose hand has been on the spigot of the subsidized lending that drove the country’s spectacular growth in its go-go years.
With his formal suits, Cornell PhD and professorial air, Coutinho was admired for policies that turned a third world striver into a global powerhouse. Now he is under attack for those same practices. His fall-from-grace saga captures the scope of the spreading disaster with his once-lauded lending practices now suspected by some as one of the causes of Brazil’s meltdown.
Brazil Energy Insight 
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