Simon Balthazar is a local businessman and brother of the murdered artist, Jacob Balthazar. He had sold the genuine Arumbayan artifact The Idol of the Broken Ear to a wealthy American named Samuel Goldbarr and relays this information about the whereabouts of the idol to Ramon Bada and Alonso Perez, and then Tintin. He was aware of the fact that his late brother had the idol among his belongings and made copies of it but was unaware that the idol had been stolen from a museum.