Brazil's Petrobras Chairman Steps Down
November 30 2015 - 8:50AM
Dow Jones News
RIO DE JANEIRO—Brazilian state-run oil company Petró leo
Brasileiro SA said Monday that Chairman Murilo Ferreira has stepped
down definitively, as he deals with the implications of a
catastrophic accident at mining giant Vale SA, where he serves as
chief executive.
Mr. Ferreira had been on temporary leave from Petrobras since
Sept. 14, Though he had only been at the company since an April
shake-up, few had expected Mr. Ferreira to return after word of
possible disagreements with Chief Executive Aldemir Bendine seeped
out of Petrobras's boardroom.
For most of this month, Mr. Ferreira's time has been consumed by
the fallout from a catastrophic dam failure at Samarco Mineraç ã o
SA, a joint venture between Vale and Australian miner BHP Billiton
Ltd. The Nov. 5 accident killed as many as 13 people, left another
eight missing and polluted hundreds of miles of rivers in
southeastern Brazil.
Vale and BHP have sought to brush off legal responsibility for
the disaster while contributing to recovery efforts. But Brazil's
attorney general's office on Friday announced a 20 billion real
($5.2 billion) civil lawsuit against Samarco "and its controllers,"
as the latter two companies have faced heavy criticism after the
disaster.
In Rio, for example, Vale became a major focus of a
demonstration Sunday that had been organized around this week's
climate-change conference in Paris. Scores of protesters, some of
them covered in mud, chanted slogans blaming Vale for the Samarco
accident.
Mr. Ferreira said Friday that the accident has been "extremely
painful" for him. He will be replaced as Petrobras chairman by Luiz
Nelson Guedes de Carvalho, who has acted as interim chairman since
September. Mr. Carvalho is an accounting professor at the
University of Sã o Paulo, one of Brazil's top universities.
Write to Paul Kiernan at paul.kiernan@wsj.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 30, 2015 08:35 ET (13:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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