Dirty family secret is behind Brazilian meat powerhouse's buying spree

Washington

WHEN beef tycoons Joesley and Wesley Batista sat down with Brazilian prosecutors last month and told them all they knew about the metastatic corruption scandal known as Carwash, they also let the world in on a dirty family secret.

The meteoric rise of the Batistas' JBS, the global meat powerhouse that seemed to come out of nowhere a decade ago, wouldn't have been possible without a top politician on the take, hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and a series of sweetheart deals with Brazil's state development bank, it was alleged.

"It wouldn't have worked," Mr Joesley Batista told them, according to videos of his testimony. "It wouldn't have been so fast."

Not since a former oil executive-turned-state witness kicked off Carwash three years ago has testimony in the case been so explosive and threatened to do so much damage to Brazil's economy and its political institutions. The fraud that the brothers described in at least seven hours of testimony is so pervasive that it has tipped Brazil back into political chaos less than a year after the nation's last p…