RIO DE JANEIRO, (Reuters) – The chief executive and other senior management at Brazil’s Petrobras resigned on Wednesday amid a festering corruption scandal, setting off a scramble to find replacements capable of restoring investor confidence in the state-run oil company.
The firm’s board of directors will meet on Friday to elect a new management team to replace CEO Maria das Gracas Foster and five other senior executives, Petrobras said in a securities filing.
Petrobras shares jumped as much as 7.8 percent in early trading in Sao Paulo on the news before paring gains to trade about 1 percent higher in mid-afternoon. The stock rose more than 15 percent on Tuesday – its biggest one-day gain in 16 years – helped by reports that President Dilma Rousseff had decided to replace Foster by the end of the month.
The timing of the resignations came as a surprise to some in the Rousseff administration, which was hoping for more time to find potential replacements, a government source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
The pressure on Foster to step aside has been mounting since Petrobras released unaudited quarterly results two weeks ago that did not include any corruption-related writedowns.
On Tuesday night, protesters were banging pots and pans outside her home in Rio de Janeiro when she returned home from a meeting with Rousseff in Brasilia.
Prior to yesterday’s resignations, Rousseff had already asked Finance Minister Joaquim Levy, a University of Chicago-trained economist and former banker, to help sound out potential candidates for a new Petrobras leadership team, another government source told Reuters on Tuesday.
The names rumored to be under consideration for CEO include former banker and central bank governor Henrique Meirelles, the former chief executive of iron-ore miner Vale, Roger Agnelli, Vale’s current CEO Murilo Ferreira and former Petrobras and OGX executive Rodolfo Landim.
