Brazil's largest industrial group lost its chosen heir in a car race, passed to the founder's twelfth child, and filed for court protection in 1983

Francesco Matarazzo left Castellabate, near Naples, in 1881 with his wife and two small children. He began making pork lard at Sorocaba and built Indústrias Reunidas Fábricas Matarazzo, Latin America's largest family industrial dynasty. King Victor Emmanuel III made him a count in 1917 and in 1926 gave the title to each of his sons, to pass to their first-born sons. His designated heir was his third son, Ermelino, general director of the whole group. Ermelino died in 1920 after an accident in a car race in Italy. Francesco took back control. When he died in 1937, his twelfth child, Francesco Júnior, born in 1900, took over. By the end of the Second World War the group had 365 factories. The group's line of presidents ran from the founder to his son to his granddaughter, Maria Pia Matarazzo. In July 1983 the group filed for concordata, a court protection short of bankruptcy, for 11 of its 43 companies. More than 11,000 workers were affected. The filing blamed the government for refusing to extend a $45 million credit line. Maria Pia blamed Brazil's economic model. A 2005 review of an authorised family biography names the way Matarazzo handled his succession as a probable cause of the family's break-up and the group's decline. The family's Jaguariaíva meatpacking plant and mansion now belong to the town.