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Pre-salt progress?

29 July 2011

Bond and BNDES financing has yet to dominate deals for Petrobras-chartered offshore assets. But Petrobras itself has access to both – for now. By Vincent Bevins.

Despite the most potent economic boom in a generation, and the massive offshore pre-salt deposits off the coast of Brazil, two factors currently hold back cross-border private project finance opportunities in the countrys oil and gas sectors: the willingness of BNDES, the countrys state-run development bank, to carry so much of the funding burden, and the propensity of sponsors to draw on plentiful foreign sources of corporate debt.

The Brazilian government pumped BNDES full of capital during the crisis of 2008 and 2009 to stave off depression and get the bigger projects going, and Petrobras, the state-owned operator with rights to most of the offshore heavy crude, is finding that it has much better access to cheap debt and equity overseas than it found before.

Petrobras used to do a lot of project financing, says Marcelo Viveiros de Moura, partner in charge of private finance at law firm Pinheiro Neto...


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