MOSCOW (MRC) -- President Dilma Rousseff is putting her faith in a state bank executive to guide Brazil’s national oil company Petrobras out of an unprecedented graft scandal. Shares plunged, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Rousseff chose Banco do Brasil CEO Aldemir Bendine as Petrobras’ new CEO, a government spokesman said in televised remarks Friday as the board met in Sao Paulo. The government controls both Petrobras and Banco do Brasil with a majority of voting shares.
Bendine, 51, is set to take over from Maria das Gracas Foster, who announced her resignation Feb. 4 after failing to broker consensus on the cost of the escalating investigation. Petrobras fell the most among major Brazilian shares on concern the new CEO lacks the independence to lead a turnaround.
At Petrobras, Bendine will take on the task of continuing to increase production at a time the company is slashing investments until it regains access to debt markets. The biggest producer in waters deeper than 100 feet (300 meters) is halting projects and considering multi-billion-dollar writedowns after the arrest of its former head of refining uncovered Brazil’s biggest-ever corruption scheme, dubbed Carwash.
As MRC wrote before, in January 2015, Petrobrasawarded two ultra-deepwater contracts to the project management, engineering and construction company, Technip. The French company would deliver flexible pipes of about 100 kilometers that would support oil production, gas lift and gas injection. These pipelines will be supplied to the Sapinhoa Norte field and I5 at Lula field, in the Santos Basin, offshore Brazil which lay at water depths of around 2,500 meters.
Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Petrobras is an integrated energy firm. Petrobras' activities include exploration, exploitation and production of oil from reservoir wells, shale and other rocks as well as refining, processing, trade and transport of oil and oil products, natural gas and other fluid hydrocarbons, in addition to other energy-related activities.
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