Joesley Batista may be one of the richest men in Brazil, as a partner in JBS, the main animal protein exporter on the planet, and having a fortune, according to the American magazine Forbesof around 4.1 billion dollars, but it is the influence he has demonstrated in politics, and even in geopolitics, that most impresses the 53-year-old Brazilian businessman, of Formosa, a small city of 115 thousand inhabitants in the state of Goiás.
On November 23, Joesley made news in Brazil, the USA and the world for having met, on his own initiative but with prior knowledge of the White House, with Nicolás Maduro and asked the president of Venezuela to leave the government peacefully.
Days earlier, Donald Trump, who had asked Maduro the same thing over the phone, had announced the closure of the South American country’s airspace in one of the latest episodes of an escalation of tension between Washington and Caracas that could lead to the first war in the region since the conflict in the Falklands in 1984. The results of the businessman’s mediation are not yet known but seen as promising by the American press.
Nonetheless, Less for geopolitical reasons and more for economic reasons, Joesley had already made headlines in Brazil, the USA and the world two months earlier, when he met this time with the North American president himself. at Sala Oval.
As JBS and the other companies in the J&F holding company, which manages them, employ more than 70,000 Americans in Trump’s country in areas such as food, energy, the financial market, mining, communication, cellulose and hygiene and cleaning, Joesley will have convinced the Republican to ease the trade tariffs imposed by the US on Brazil and to promote commercial dialogue between the two largest nations on the American continent.
Once again, he acted alone, outside the Brazilian government, but subsequently, Trump and Brazilian President Lula da Silva met at the UN General Assembly, exchanged pleasantries and began an unlikely relationship that resulted, in fact, in a substantial reduction in commercial taxes and even in collaboration between the countries in the fight against organized crime.
It is not new, however, that Joesley influences the lives of presidents and presidential candidates. In 2017, after being investigated by the police in operations Sepsis, Greenfield, Cui Bono, Carne Fraca and Bullish, the first of which derived from Lava Jato, he decided to sign a plea bargain agreement with the authorities. And he did it his way. He scheduled a meeting outside the official agenda with then-president Michel Temer at his official residence, late on the night of March 7, and recorded the conversation with equipment hidden in his clothes.
At a certain point, Temer said “you have to keep it there, see”, a phrase that would mark Brazilian politics at the time, after Joesley had told him that he was paying for the silence of Eduardo Cunha, the former president of the Chamber of Deputies, who had since been arrested as part of Lava-Jato, who had led the process of impeachment of Dilma Rousseff the previous year who elevated the vice-president to president.
The day following the release of the recording, May 17, 2017, became known on the São Paulo stock exchange, Bovespa, as “Joesley Day” because it was marked by a 12% drop in share value in less than an hour and a 10% increase in the dollar in the same period.
In politics, the Federal Supreme Court ordered the opening of an investigation against Temer for passive corruption, obstruction of justice and criminal organization which, according to the Brazilian Constitution, would have to be authorized by the National Congress, which rejected it and freed the president from deposition after months of high tension in Brasília.
In parallel, Joesley also recorded a phone call with Aécio Neves, who had lost the 2014 presidential election to Dilma by a small margin and hoped to run for office in 2018.after Temer’s buffer government, with legitimate hopes of victory. In the call, however, Aécio asks Joesley for two million reais, around 550 thousand euros at the exchange rate at the time, to pay lawyers to defend him against Lava-Jato.
The publication of this and other compromising excerpts ruined the political career of the then presidential candidate for the PSDB, a center-right party that also never recovered after the episode. And it paved the way for the election in 2018 of Jair Bolsonaro, who took advantage of the crisis, not only in the PSDB, but also in the PT, the other dominant force in post-redemocratization local politics, hit even more vehemently by Lava-Jato, to carry out an anti-system speech.
Joesley, with his brother Wesley, is responsible for the internationalization of the family company JBS formed in Goiás by José Batista Sobrinho (the brand has the initials of the name of the patriarch), father of both of them and of Junior, the eldest son, also a businessman.
Today, JBS, via holding J&F owns brands such as Swift, Seara or Friboi, in the beef processing area, Pic Pay and Banco Original, in the financial sector, Âmbar, in the energy segment, Canal Rural, in the communication area, Eldorado, a paper and cellulose giant, Flora, in the cleaning and cosmetics sector, and LHG, in the mineral extraction segment.
Married to Ticiana Villas Boas, former TV news presenter for Rede BandeirantesJoesley had, according to celebrity magazines at the time, his marriage at risk even during the recording phase to Temer and Aécio because he had mistakenly sent other audios to the police, which became public, in which he spoke of extramarital affairs.
These audios sent by mistake, in fact, also revealed other crimes committed by Joesley himself related to the Ministry of Agriculture that led him to preventive detention for six months, between 2017 and 2018. Released in March, he returned to jail in November of that year but only for three days.
From then on, he went through a period of discreet action, while he witnessed the unstoppable growth of business, to the point of becoming close to Trump, influencing a commercial relationship between gigantic nations and even negotiating the suspension of a war.