Jeb Blount – Reuters, 10/22/2012
Brazil’s Refinaria de Petroleos Manguinhos SA has offered to sell part of its property to the government of Rio de Janeiro state for 350 million reais ($173 million) in an effort to stave off expropriation, the company said on Monday.
The offered property represents about 20 percent of the company’s land, which is near downtown Rio de Janeiro and the city’s port. The sale of the roughly 25-acre (10-hectare) plot would allow the 60-year-old refinery to continue operating, Manguinhos said in a statement.
Manguinhos is the only Brazilian refinery not controlled by state-led oil company Petrobras. It also has some of the only non-Petrobras oil terminal and storage facilities near Brazil’s rapidly expanding offshore oil frontier in the Campos and Santos basins.
