Petrobras` new board chair has insisted he will have full autonomy as he leads the scandal-plagued Brazilian oil giant through a crisis that cost his predecessor her job.
"In inviting me (to take over from Foster) the executive board gave me complete automomy and freedom to run the company," Aldemir Bendine told Globo television Tuesday night.
Bendine, who replaced Grace Foster, is widely regarded as close to President Dilma Rousseff, herself a former Petrobras chair.
Petrobras is reeling from allegations of corruption on a massive scale with kickbacks and political payoffs costing Brazil`s biggest company an estimated $3.8 billion.
The whistleblower alleges dozens of government allies benefited from payments from hugely inflated contracts, although no politician has yet been charged in connection with the affair.
After Rousseff twice rejected her offers to resign, Foster quit a week ago along with her board of directors, initially prompting the company`s share price to rise before falling back on the appointment of Bendine, previously chief executive of state-controlled Banco do Brasil.
Foster`s position became untenable after Petrobras repeatedly delayed the release of its third-quarter results prior to last week`s publication of externally unaudited results which did not state the company`s estimated losses due to corruption.
That kicked off a damaging week in which Petrobras lost nearly $9 billion in stock value and was downgraded by two ratings agencies.
Worse still, the recent slump in oil prices have caused some analysts to question the viability of extracting so called "pre-salt" oil from deep in the Atlantic.
Heavily indebted Petrobras is setting great store by eventual exploitation of the reserves discovered in 2006 lying deep in the ocean under layers of salt and which could double Petrobras` daily production to five million barrels by 2020, although extraction presents technological challenges.
Bendine also told Globo that Petrobras had not decided if it would book 88.6 billion reais ($31 billion) of likely asset writedowns noted in its internally audited results.
