Reese Ewing News

Brazilian shipbuilder Engevix Construcoes Oceanicas (Ecovix) is expected to file for bankruptcy protection from creditors in a local court this month, the newspaper Valor Economico said on Wednesday. The company, based in Rio de Janeiro, has more than 6 billion reais ($1.7 billion) in outstanding debts, according to Valor. Ecovix did not immediately respond to requests for comment made via phone and email. According to Valor, Ecovix's creditors include state-run oil company Petrobras, suppliers, China's Cosco, Norway's NOV and also local banks Bradesco, Banco do Brasil and Caixa Economica Federal. The company's expected request for protection from creditors is intended to give it room to negotiate a debt restructuring and the sale of company assets to new investors, the paper said.

Brazil's new sugar terminal at the port of Suape in the state of Pernambuco will load its first ship on Friday, opening a new export corridor for mills in the Northeast at a time of strong demand for the sweetener.   The Suape Sugar Terminal (TAS) was built by the Agrovia do Nordeste consortium, which is controlled by the logistic arm of Brazilian engineering conglomerate Odebrecht and by transportation firm Agrovia.     (Reporting by Gustavo Bonato; Writing by Reese Ewing and Marcelo Teixeira)

A fire at the Rumo sugar and grain terminal in Brazil's Santos port that started early Thursday restricted operations but caused no injuries, according to a spokesman for the company controlled by sugar and ethanol producer Cosan SA. The blaze broke out around 4 a.m. local time (0700 GMT) and the company expects to resume normal operations by midday Thursday, the spokesman said. The fire started at a conveyor belt which connects two of Rumo's warehouse complexes and was controlled within an hour, after loading and unloading were temporarily suspended. News of the incident in the world's biggest sugar producing nation triggered a more than 4 percent rally in sugar prices . Futures have pared back some early gains but are still trading up 2.5 percent at 11:00 a.m. local time.

Brazil's Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi said on Thursday before the Senate's Agriculture Committee that he would oppose a government proposal to tax farm exports as a way to cover a growing deficit in the country's social security program.   The president's Chief of Staff Eliseu Padilha told the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper published on Thursday the tax was part of a proposal to reform Brazil's social security program. (Reporting by Leonardo Goy; Writing by Reese Ewing)

Chevron plans to sign a 5-year agreement to lease berthing space for its vessels from U.S. oil service company Edison Chouest Offshore, Chouest's head of Brazilian operations said on Tuesday.   Chouest's 950-million-real ($275 million) base is located at Prumo Logistica's Port of Acu, on the northeast coast of Rio de Janeiro state. It is scheduled to be completed by mid-2017, Chouest's Brazilian head Ricardo Chagas told reporters. ($1 = 3.4485 Brazilian reais) (Reporting by Jeb Blount; Writing by Reese Ewing; Editing by Daniel Flynn)

Stevedores in Santos, Brazil's largest port, have scheduled a 24-hour strike for Monday, demanding wage hike adjustments for inflation as the country's main commodity markets gear up for the export season. Stevedores are due to suspend work at 07:00 a.m. Brasilia time for a full day but could extend the strike indefinitely, union President Rodnei Oliveira da Silva said. "All terminals will be affected," he said. It is still unclear what types of cargo will be affected. Typically dry bulk loading of soybeans, raw sugar and corn continues uninterrupted during stevedore strikes, as manual labor needs are limited for those operations. But loading of containers and other more labor-intensive goods could suffer.

Brazilian police said on Monday they were looking into possible bribes paid in contracts signed by state-run oil company Petrobras and shipbuilder Sete Brasil with Singapore's Keppel Fels. Federal police carried out a fresh wave of searches and arrests on Monday in the ongoing "Operations Car Wash" corruption investigation that started nearly two years ago. Brazilian engineering giant Odebrecht, one of the main companies at the center of the scandal, said its offices in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and in Bahia were searched by police.   Reporting by Reese Ewing

Up to a dozen containers carrying chemicals caught fire at a terminal at Brazil's largest port of Santos on Thursday, restricting ship movement, representatives of the port authority Codesp said. The fire at the container terminal operated by logistics company Localfrio in Guaruja, on the eastern side of Santos, started around 3 p.m. Brasilia time (1700 GMT) and continued into the evening, sending plumes of smoke across the shipping channel at the commodity exporting port. The port authority said in a statement it had stopped ships from docking at a terminal operated by Santos Brasil next to Localfrio's Alfandegado terminal because of smoke, but otherwise the port was operating normally. Santos Brasil also said its operations were stopped indefinitely.

Brazilian iron ore miner Vale SA said late on Tuesday in a filing it had completed the sale of four very large ore carriers (VLOC), also known as Valemax class ships, to a consortium lead by ICBC Financial Leasing. ICBC is a subsidiary of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited. The deal was valued at $423 million and the resources were transferred to Vale on Tuesday. Each VLOC has the capacity to carry 400,000 tonnes of ore. Reporting by Reese Ewing

Murilo Ferreira quit as chairman of Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro SA, the state-controlled oil company said on Monday, without disclosing the reason for his decision. Ferreira had been on a leave of absence since Sept. 14, and Nelson Carvalho replaced him on an interim basis. In a securities filing, the company known as Petrobras said Carvalho would stay in that position until the board convened to elect a new chairman. Ferreira, who has been chief executive officer of Brazilian iron ore miner Vale SA since 2011, became Petrobras chairman of Petrobras in April, as the company was sinking deeper into its the worst crisis in history. Prosecutors…

Brazil's main Port of Santos is forecast to surpass record exports of 114 million tonnes set in 2013 by the end of this year, as the real's depreciation against the dollar sparks sales of local goods abroad, the state-run company Codesp that manages the port said on Monday.   Reporting by Reese Ewing

The Brazilian government plans to hold a new oil bidding round for areas in the subsalt polygon by 2017, the secretary of oil and gas at the Mines and Energy Ministry, Marco Antonio Almeida, said on Monday.   Almeida denied during a presentation in Rio that the current corruption scandal plaguing state oil company Petrobras was delaying the auction being held sooner.     (Reporting by Marta Nogeira; Writing by Reese Ewing; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Brazil was due to publish a tariff increase of 11.75 percent on imported ethanol on Monday, and the traders in U.S. ethanol, which makes up the bulk of imports to Brazil, were concerned about the move, expected to benefit local mills. In late May, the Senate passed Bill 668, which raises Brazil's so-called PIS-COFINS taxes on a broad array of imports including ethanol to 11.75 percent. President Dilma Rousseff signed the bill into law late on Friday, a spokesman at the Presidential Palace said on Monday. It remained unclear whether she included any vetoes to parts of the bill the Senate passed. The federal government's Official Daily Register (DOU) did not include the signed bill in its Monday morning edition but the spokesman said the signed bill would appear in the afternoon edition.

Four Petrobras oil platforms off the northeast coast of Brazil have halted production after a leak of about 7,000 liters of oil was detected coming from a pipeline linking them, a local oil workers union head said on Friday. Brazil's oil regulator, ANP, confirmed the leak in the Camorim field, 16 kilometers (10 miles) off the coast of the city of Aracajú, and said it had already been contained by Petrobras. The director of the Sindipetro oil workers union for Alagoas/Sergipe Basin, Stoessel Chagas, said the leak was detected coming from a pipeline linking the PCM-5 and PCM-6 production platforms of Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as Petrobras is officially known. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The first ship to load soybeans from the new Tegram terminal in the northeastern port of Ponta Madeira in Sao Luis, Brazil, will berth on March 10, local shipping agents Cargonave said on Tuesday.   The Panamax class vessel Scythia Graeca will haul 66,000 tonnes of soybeans for U.S.-based CHS bound for China.     (Reporting by Gustavo Bonato; Writing by Reese Ewing; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Striking truckers lifted their blockade of dozens of highways in Brazil after police began fining and arresting protesters, though strike organizers said they had no plans to end their stoppage now in its 10th day. Road blockages were reported at 59 locations across six states on Friday down from the Thursday count of 88 road blocks, according to the latest report from highway police. Most protesting drivers rejected an initial government offer and negotiations were not scheduled to resume until March 10. Even so, a spokesman for Paranagua port said 514 soy trucks had arrived on Friday, up from 255 trucks at the same time on Thursday. Brazil is the world's No. 2 soy producer and a top global supplier.

Brazil, Argentina and the United States have tightened port entry procedures for ships that have sailed from West Africa in a bid to control the potential spread of the deadly Ebola virus. Ebola has killed more than 3,400 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and its spread has become a global concern -- with worries for trade, which could affect the airline and tourism industries together with seaborne activity. The virus is already threatening to disrupt logistics activity…

Brazil's iron ore miner Vale SA said on Friday it secured a deal with China Merchants Group to lease for 25 years as many as 10 very large ore carriers, which will be built by China Merchants, to ship ore from Brazil to mainland China. Vale had commissioned at least 35 VLOCs, as they are known in the shipping industry, to be built over the past decade by Asian shipbuilders, some Chinese. The miner intended to cut its freight costs for shipping ore to China, the world's largest producer of steel and consumer of iron ore, to better compete with rival Australian miners. But until now, China has banned such large vessels that can carry more than 400,000 tonnes from entering its ports.

Brazil exported 2.71 million 60-kg bags of green coffee in August, nearly unchanged from July shipments of a revised 2.70 million bags, the Council of Green Coffee Exporters (Cecafe) said on Monday. Brazil exported 2.38 million bags in August of 2013. Even with drought damage to the crop, which is now essentially finished harvesting, Cecafe reported a 20 percent increase in coffee exports since January compared with the shipments over the first eight months of 2013. (Reporting by Reese Ewing and Caroline Stauffer; Editing by Diane Craft)

Sugar output from Brazil's main center-south cane region slipped in the second half of July to 2.24 million tonnes, down from the 2.55 million tonne output in the prior two weeks due to rains over the productive region, the cane industry said on Tuesday. In its latest biweekly crushing report, industry association Unica said cumulative sugar output since the start of the season in April had reached 15.13 million tonnes by July 31, up 9 percent from the same period a year ago. (Reporting by Reese Ewing; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Firefighters at Brazil's Santos Port contained a blaze at two sugar warehouses operated by Cosan SA early on Monday, but the damage threatened to disrupt exports. The fire broke out at the sugar terminal's Warehouse X at 4:30 p.m. local time (1930 GMT) on Sunday, and 100 firefighters were on site Monday morning, said press representatives for Cosan, Brazil's biggest sugar producer. The cause of the fire was unknown. Last October, fire gutted the Santos export terminal of Brazil's largest sugar trader, Copersucar SA, quickly sending futures prices up 6 percent and causing the trader to issue force majeure to its clients. A spokesman at the Santos fire department said workers had finished controlling the fire and started an "aftermath" operation around 4 a.m. local time.

Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras said on Tuesday it produced an average of 2.61 million barrels per day (boepd) of oil and equivalent natural gas in May domestically and abroad, up 2 percent from the previous month. Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as the firm is formally known, said production in Brazil reached an average of 2.39 million barrels per day (boepd) of oil and equivalent natural gas, up 2.2 percent from the previous month. Jose Formigli, Petrobras' head of exploration, described the results as "very good" at an event in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday.

Brazil's exports of coffee, iron ore and soybeans eased in June while shipments of raw sugar picked up last month, monthly data from the trade ministry showed on Tuesday. Brazil exported 6.9 million tonnes of soybeans in June versus 7.6 million tonnes in May. (Reporting by Caroline Stauffer and Reese Ewing; Editing by Chris Reese)