Rio de Janeiro, Feb 4 (IANS/EFE) Brazilian state-controlled oil company Petrobras, which is mired in a massive corruption scandal, Wednesday said its entire senior management team will be replaced and that the names of the new directors could be announced in two days.
"Petrobras confirms that its board of directors will meet Friday to choose the new management team following the resignation of the president (of the company) and five other senior directors," the oil giant said in a securities filing.
The filing confirmed media reports Tuesday indicating that CEO Maria das Graças Silva Foster agreed on her own departure and that of the rest of her management team in a meeting Tuesday with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
Brazil's government is the majority shareholder in Petrobras, whose shares are traded on the Sao Paulo, New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires stock exchanges.
Foster's departure was deemed necessary after a huge kickback scandal implicated several former Petrobras executives who had been part of her management team.
Buoyed by the media reports that Rousseff had accepted Foster's resignation, Petrobras's share price moved sharply higher Tuesday and at Wednesday's market opening.
Henrique Meirelles, the former governor of Brazil's central bank and erstwhile president and chief operating officer of BankBoston, is among the candidates to replace Foster, according to media reports.
Petrobras released its delayed 2014 third-quarter earnings report last Wednesday.
But in a surprise decision, the quarterly result did not give a monetary estimate for how much the company's assets were overvalued as a result of the corruption scheme, in which leading Brazilian engineering companies allegedly formed a cartel to artificially drive up the price of contracts awarded by Petrobras.
As part of that scheme, the companies paid kickbacks to some Petrobras executives and funnelled a portion of the money from the inflated contracts to Brazilian political parties.
The scandal erupted last March and has led so far to the detention of three former Petrobras directors along with executives of major Brazilian construction and engineering companies.
--IANS/EFE
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