Petrobras has made a cost-saving voluntary layoffs deal with thousands of its employees, according to Reuters.
Under the deal, 6,100 staff would accept early terminations, saving Brazil’s scandal-plagued state oil firm huge amounts in potential future labour costs, albeit after incurring the hit of the layoff payouts.
That would be a trade-off Petrobras would jump at as it tries to dig itself out of a financial hole as the world’s most indebted oil company.
With vast offshore interests, Petrobras is a major player in oil production in the Americas but its image and performance have been crippled the past two years because of the bribes-for-contracts scandal involving many of its own executives and a number of engineering firms.
The deadline for taking voluntary layoff is the end of this month and there are another 6,000 eligible workers who have yet to agree so the numbers could get even better for Petrobras in the next few days.
But it’s rarely all good news for the firm and in an unrelated matter, Brazil’s antitrust agency CADE on Thursday named Petrobras as one of 11 companies it is investigating on suspicion of conspiring to rig prices in the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) market.
