AT SOME POINT in the middle of a 16-day roadshow, Almir Barbassa, Petrobras’s CFO and one of the key architects of the $70 billion equity offering he was selling to Europe’s leading investors, found a quiet moment. Its exact location has been forgotten among the general confusion created by the roadshow’s almost perpetual motion. Barbassa had had dinner at 30,000 feet; lunch had been taken in a nondescript meeting room in a four-star hotel in one of Europe’s capital cities, sandwiches on the table, men (usually men, but there were some women at these meetings) in suits on the other side, asking the same questions he had been asked a few hours earlier over a breakfast meeting that had...
