🔎 An elusive businessman

Adam Smith came up with the concept of the invisible hand of the market — the unseen force that, in theory, guides self-interested actors toward the common good. On an admittedly smaller scale, Brazil's markets may have found their own version, though the resemblance ends at “invisible.” 

Nelson Tanure rarely grants interviews, describes himself as a loner, and prefers to operate by way of a thicket of investment funds that tend to obscure his precise position. Meanwhile, his hand pops up in a variety of sectors: in oil and telecoms, electricity and supermarkets, newspapers and real estate. But where Smith's hand was meant to leave markets better off, Tanure's has a habit of leaving litigation in its wake.

That history of risk and dispute is one reason his name repeatedly surfaces in investigations into the sprawling Banco Master scandal, which authorities have described as the largest case of banking fraud in Brazil's history…

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