Following a vote at an extraordinary meeting of the BRF Board of Directors on April 26, Pedro Pullen Parente was named the new chairman of the Brazil-based meat and poultry company.
Parente, 65, is currently the president and chief executive of oil Company Petroleo Brasileiro.
According to an announcement to the market posted on the BRF website, all matters set forth on the meeting’s agenda were approved. In an earlier notice from BRF, the proposed slate of board members and officers was listed. That listing included Parente as chairman and Augusto Marques da Cruz Filho as vice chairman. Other board member nominations on the agenda were Dan Ioschpe, Flávia Buarque de Almeida, Francisco Petros Oliveira Lima Papathanasiadis, José Luiz Osório, Luiz Fernando Furlan, Roberto Antonio Mendes, Roberto Rodrigues and Walter Malieni Jr.
The extraordinary board meeting had been scheduled after the two largest shareholders of BRF, Petros and Previ, had called for a new board of directors, largely because of dissatisfaction with the company’s recent financial performance. BRF concluded its 2017 fiscal year with a net loss of BRL1.2 billion ($371 million).
The company has also been hampered after being implicated in the Operation Weak Flesh investigation, and having imports from 12 of its plants banned from import into the European Union.
To mitigate some of its lost income, the company has had to lay off workers at its plants in Rio Verde, Carambei, Capinzal and Mineiros, although a large portion of those furloughed in Mineiros have reportedly returned to work.
Earlier this week, BRF announced that the company’s global CEO, José Aurélio Drummond Jr., had resigned after serving in that capacity for about four months. Drummond was also a member of the board. Lorival Nogueira Luz Jr., chief financial and investor relations officer, was appointed to serve as the interim CEO, while also maintaining his current job responsibilities.
