In April 2026 the São Paulo State Court (Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo) granted a declaration of incapacity in respect of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and appointed his son Paulo Henrique as interim conservator for acts of asset management. The grounds: advanced Alzheimer's disease, with loss of the discernment required for contracts, investments and business decisions.
The case reached the news as a political fact. But for anyone who works in wealth planning, it is a legal system working correctly — engaged because the planning did not arrive first.
The Portuguese word interdição evokes an old image: the individual who loses, all at once, the whole of their legal capacity. That figure no longer exists in Brazilian law.
Today, conservatorship (curatela) is an extraordinary and proportionate measure that reaches only acts of a patrimonial and business character: contracts, investments, management of assets. The person's existential rights remain untouched — autonomy over their own body, family life, privacy.
Conservatorship does not paralyze the person; it paralyzes management
That distinction is not a technicality. It is the core of the problem for any business owner or head of family with substantial assets.
In practice, powers of attorney granted before the illness advanced cease to be valid — the principal's supervening incapacity is a statutory ground for termination of the mandate. Contracts under way have to be ratified. Ordinary acts of management come to depend on the conservator. And extraordinary acts — selling a property, disposing of a shareholding, taking on significant obligations — require judicial authorization, with the Public Prosecutor's Office (Ministério Público) heard on the matter.
The family, already facing a health crisis, now has the State present in every significant decision about the estate. A governance crisis is created. The pace of management changes. Operating costs rise.
What the holding company needs to have
A family holding company does not solve this problem by existing. It solves it when it was set up with enough governance to function without depending on the head of the family's legal capacity.
That means articles of association (contrato social) with clear management rules for incapacity scenarios, internal powers of attorney with defined limits, and a decision-making structure that does not concentrate everything in a single signature. Where those elements are in place, management of the estate carries on under rules the owner set — before needing a judge to set them instead.
The difference between the two scenarios is not legal. It is a matter of timing: one was planned in advance, the other was resolved after the fact.
The question that remains
Fernando Henrique Cardoso's children went to court in agreement, with robust medical reports and a history of powers of attorney signaling their father's prior wishes. The proceeding ran as orderly a course as the situation allows.
In the owner's absence, would the management rules be clear to the family? Or would the last word on who decides, how, and about what, rest with a judge who does not know the business?
