The main creditors of Braskem are maintaining pressure on the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras to undertake a capital injection that would prevent the petrochemical company from having to resort to the courts to avoid bankruptcy.
According to sources cited by "Bloomberg," bondholders such as Elliott Investment Management or Contrarian Capital Management are leaning towards this route, although Petrobras would be reluctant, as it does not want to be forced to assume Braskem's liabilities with presidential elections scheduled for October.
Currently, Petrobras controls 36.1% of Braskem's capital, which represents 47% of the voting shares. Despite this, some creditors are demanding that the oil company increase its stake, provide additional liquidity, or resort to issuing subordinated debt.
According to other sources, Petrobras's caution is due to the risk of ending up incorporating Braskem's hefty debt into its own balance sheet, whose financial situation is weighed down by liabilities of several billion euros.
Braskem has until August 24 to close an out-of-court restructuring agreement and thus avoid a process supervised by the Justice. To do this, the company needs the backing of at least one third of its creditors.
In any case, negotiations are ongoing, and the options to avoid a judicial restructuring have improved after international bondholders presented a new out-of-court restructuring counterproposal that Braskem considers more advantageous.
Results of 2025
In 2025, Braskem cut its losses by 12.7% after recording net "red numbers" attributed to 9.879 billion reais (1.673 billion euros), while gross revenue decreased by 8.9%, to 82.090 billion reais (82.090 billion euros).
Only in the fourth quarter of the year, the company recorded losses of 10.284 billion reais (1.741 billion euros) and reached revenues of 18.296 billion reais (3.098 billion euros), which represents increases of 82.1% and 18.5%, respectively.