Brazilian businesspeople are not easily shocked. In the past decade they have seen two business empires collapse in ignominy. Eike Batista, for a time Brazil’s richest man, lost his ports-to-mines group amid charges of bribery and market manipulation (for which he was briefly jailed). Marcelo Odebrecht, the scion of a construction dynasty, went to prison over the “Big Oily” graft scheme centred on Petrobras, the state oil giant.