Brazil’s Eike Batista expected back in Brazil to face charges on Monday

Since the raid, a Brazilian judge had declared him a fugitive and requested his name be added to a wanted list maintained by Interpol, the international police agency. Local media had been speculating whether Batista, who also holds a German passport, would seek to go on the lam. His lawyers, however, assured Brazilian prosecutors that Batista would return. The lawyers did not return calls or an email from Reuters on Sunday.

Just five years ago, Batista, now 60, was calculated to have a net worth exceeding $30 billion and was considered among the world’s 10 richest people. A brash former wildcat gold miner, he successfully attracted ravenous demand for shares in his mining and energy ventures at the end of the last decade, when a commodities boom led to a period of sustained economic growth and heavy foreign investment in Brazil.

With the plummeting of oil and mineral prices in recent years, however, Brazil entered a recession, and Batista’s empire evaporated. As the bonanza faded, investigators in Brazil discovered massive amounts of corruption around many major projects of the boom years.

Starting with a historic probe into kickbacks around state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras , the investigation shed light on a culture of bribery between government officials, politicians and many big companies, especially engineering, energy and infrastructure groups reliant on public licenses and contracts.

Police said last week that Batista had paid roughly $16 million to former Rio governor Sergio Cabral in exchange for support of the businessman’s many Rio-based endeavors. Cabral, who resigned from office in 2014, has been jailed since last year for a series of other major corruption charges.

Batista, according to Globo, checked in on an American Airlines flight scheduled to land in Rio at 10:30 a.m. local time.