Politics may hinder clean-up job by new Petrobras chief

Rio de Janeiro

BY picking a banker instead of an oil executive to run Petrobras, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff appears to have recognised that the state-run company's biggest priority is to clean up its books and acknowledge how many billions of dollars it lost to a corruption scheme in recent years.

Yet her choice on Friday of confidant Aldemir Bendine also signals that Ms Rousseff wants to maintain tight control over the company, which investors fear could prevent it from releasing a fully realistic estimate of graft-related losses.