Brazilian state-run oil company Petrobras approved a series of financial agreements with local and international banks that will meet its financing needs in 2015, the company announced. In a filing with local stock regulators, Petrobras said that the deals will provide the company with access to about 6.2 billion dollars, including a 3.5bn financing contract reached with China Development Bank on April 1.
A new World Bank Group report, “Shared Prosperity and Poverty Eradication in Latin America and the Caribbean”, explores the performance of eight countries to understand what has driven progress, and what it will take to sustain it.
The Falkland Islands government (FIG) announced it has extended the public consultation period for the Oil & Gas Social Effects Monitoring Program, which was originally intended to end this week. The new deadline is Friday 24 April.
In its latest semiannual report, “Latin America Treads a Narrow Path to Growth: The Slowdown and its Macroeconomic Challenges,” the World Bank´s Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean forecasts a fourth year of slow growth for the region.
China has awarded Venezuela 5 billion dollars for unspecified “development plans,” President Nicolas Maduro said on Sunday, approximately three months after an official visit to China. According to published reports, the loan is part of a 10 billion deal to be completed in the following months.
Uruguay's president Tabare Vazquez announced that when he meets with Brazil's Dilma Rousseff next month, they will consider as a priority how to get the Mercosur-European Union talks for a trade agreement rolling again.
Argentine president Cristina Fernandez is leaving this week for an official visit to Russia and controversy over the agreements to be signed has erupted following the publication of a letter in a Sunday newspaper signed by a group of former Energy secretaries who claim the accords compromise Argentina with a foreign country in the execution of highly costly works, like it was done with China”.
The United States Energy Information Agency once again capitulated on the myth that rig counts don't matter and the productivity of wells would largely offset, leaving the industry on a continuous path to higher output. The current consensus of 500,000 B/D additional growth in 2015 US production now appears very much at risk.
Brazil is working with Congress on a broad agenda of structural changes to improve the business climate, increase productivity and set price signals correctly to stimulate investment, announced Finance minister Joaquim Levy in his speech to the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) this weekend.
A vice president of construction company Camargo Correa told Brazilian prosecutors that he paid 36 million dollars in bribes to officials of state-controlled oil company Petrobras, the press reported, citing a document prepared by prosecutors.