Brazil

Troubled engineering conglomerate Odebrecht SA’s oil and gas arm said late Tuesday it has entered into an agreement with a group of creditors to restructure its financial debt, The Wall Street Journal reported. Odebrecht Óleo e Gás said it filed the reorganization plan, covering $5 billion in debt, with a Rio de Janeiro court. Creditors representing more than 60% of the claims accepted the plan, the company said in a statement. Odebrecht SA signed a multibillion anticorruption settlement with Brazilian, U.S.

Brazil’s real, stocks and bonds tumbled as a fresh political crisis ensnared President Michel Temer and threatened to derail an agenda designed to pull Latin America’s largest economy out of its deepest recession on record, Bloomberg News reported. Trading on the Ibovespa briefly came to a halt Thursday, sinking the most since 2008, with state-owned companies from Petroleo Brasileiro SA to Banco do Brasil SA among the worst losses. The real posted its biggest slide since 1999 even after the central bank intervened to support the currency.

Brazil's electricity watchdog Aneel expects a further delay in the construction of 6,000 kilometers of power lines licensed to Abengoa SA, raising concern over the reliability of the country's grid as a massive new dam comes online, according to an internal document seen by Reuters. Abengoa halted construction of the transmission lines in 2015 amid a financial crisis at its headquarters in Spain which was followed by a bankruptcy filing at its units operating in Brazil, Reuters reported.

Banks are raising the heat on Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht SA to put its house in order after months of treating the scandal-hit company with kid gloves because of fears its collapse could hurt their balance sheets, sources said.

One year ago, Brazil’s Vice President Michel Temer — a veteran political operative — took the country’s helm after Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, promising to rein in public spending and return the economy to expansion. While he has taken steps to control the government’s outlays, growth remains elusive, Bloomberg News reported. Investors are pretty happy with his tenure, but Brazilians are somewhat less so, with opinion polls showing his approval rating hovering around the 10 percent mark. Still, no one’s complaining about the drop in inflation.

The Brazilian government plans to change the bankruptcy law to help indebted firms emerge faster from creditor protection, Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles told a newspaper. The changes would reduce the average length of bankruptcy protection to two years, compared to between seven and eight years currently, he said in an interview published on Tuesday in the O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper.

A former top official of Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht SA testified that he was asked in 2014 to bribe the then-head of Mexican state oil firm Petróleos Mexicanos, according to a document filed with Brazil’s Supreme Court as part of a broader corruption investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Brazilian phone company Oi SA said on Tuesday that Orascom TMT Holdings SAE, controlled by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, and a group of bondholder have given the carrier until June 1 to put together a restructuring plan to help it exit bankruptcy protection, Reuters reported. This is the fourth extension granted Oi by Orascom, which offered in December an exchange of debt for shares and a capital injection of as much as $1.25 billion in the phone company. Oi filed for bankruptcy protection in June last year under the burden of debts totaling 65 billion reais ($20.6 billion).

The Brazilian government will introduce legislation granting it the power to intervene when telecom operators under bankruptcy protection, the head of telecoms regulator Anatel said on Thursday. Juarez Quadros said the decision was meant to avoid any judicial questioning of future interventions, but did not say when the government planned to submit the legislation, Reuters reported. Since March, the government has promised to enact a decree to allow authorities to intervene in debt-laden OI SA .

Declining borrowing costs in Brazil will help local companies cut their debt and speed up refinancing efforts with creditors, even if they fail to jump-start economic growth in the short run, Moody's Investors Service said in a report on Wednesday. The central bank's rate-reduction cycle should have the immediate effect of alleviating the burden of companies struggling with large chunks of real-denominated debt, the report said. Brazilian companies pay the highest borrowing costs among the world's major economies, Reuters reported.