Brazilians have become inured to seeing politicians and businessmen marched off to prison for corruption. But the mug shot of banker André Esteves—unshaven and frowning—that flashed across TV screens in early December was a shock. Part of a cadre of mavericks who got astonishingly rich from Brazil’s transformation into one of the world’s top 10 economies in the 2000s, Esteves helped turn Grupo BTG Pactual into Latin America’s biggest standalone investment bank. Supremely confident, Esteves—who was a billionaire by his mid-30s—liked to quip that the initials in his company’s name stood for “Better than Goldman.”
Around dawn on Nov. 25, Esteves’s fortunes soured in an instant. Police showed up at his apartment, which faces Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Ipanema beach, and hauled him away on allegations of obstructing a federal investigation into a massive pay-to-play scheme centered on Brazil’s state-run oil giant, Petrobras. Now Esteves, 47, resides in a cell block with concrete beds and communal toilets at Bangu, a high-security prison in Rio better known for housing drug traffickers and murderers.
Brazil Energy Insight 
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