SÃO PAULO, Brazil â€" The troubled Brazilian businessman Eike Batista on Tuesday night fired the chief executive and chief legal officer of his petroleum company OGX.
The firm’s current chief financial officer, Paulo Amaral, will be the new C.E.O. and will retain his old position.
OGX announced the management shake-up in a filing with Brazil’s securities and exchange commission, the CVM.
The filing also said that the firm was hiring the Brazilian private equity and advisory firm Angra Partners to advise it on its restructuring. Angra Partners has already been advising Mr. Batista and his holding company, EBX, since September, along with the Blackstone Group and Lazard.
Mr. Batista still holds more than a 50 percent in OGX, but he has already sold controlling stakes in two of the six companies that he founded and listed on the São Paulo stock exchange.
OGX’s filing with the CVM also said the company was hiring “a specialized consultancy with an international reputation†to audit the company’s books from now to 2008, when it held its initial public offering.
The CVM is already investigating OGX and several of its current and former managers, including Mr. Batista, over allegations that the company, which frequently announced major petroleum finds that subsequently proved economically unviable, may have violated disclosure rules about its operations.
The Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo reported that a new investor group that it did not name had demanded the new management and the audit as a condition for investing in OGX. The newspaper said the investor group was from the United States and had agreed to invest $200 million so OGX could resume producing petroleum.
It is unclear how such a deal, if it exists, would be structured, as $200 million would not be nearly enough to keep OGX from bankruptcy, and Brazilian law does not provide the same protections that American law does for last-minute investors in failing companies.
Thomas Felsberg, a bankruptcy lawyer in São Paulo, said that investors who provide so-called “debtor-in-possession†or financing do receive some priority in Brazil, but they are not automatically the first to be repaid, as they are in the United States.
“The rules are not that clear about the priority of DIP lenders. You may have to compete with other creditors,†he said.
OGX missed a $45 million bond payment on Oct. 1 and has another $110 million due in December as part of regular interest payments on its $3.6 billion in bonds, most of which are held by foreign investors including Pimco, the world’s largest bond investor.
The missed payment triggered a 30-day grace period. After that, if the company does not reach an agreement with creditors, it will have to seek a bankruptcy court’s protection.
Last year Mr. Batista had promised that OGX would produce 50,000 barrels of oil a day this year, but the company only managed about 5,000 a day at its peak. Since August, it has not produced any petroleum at all.
On Monday night, Mr. Batista’s company MMX sold a controlling stake in a partially-constructed port to the Dutch commodity trading company Trafigura and Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, in a deal worth $996 billion. As part of that deal, Trafigura and Mubadala will both invest new cash to complete the port and assume part of the company’s debt.
