Rebuilding trust is Novonor's biggest challenge

Renamed Novonor in 2020, the Bahian group tries to regain its reputation and access to credit lines.

11/23/2021

Involved in one of the biggest corruption scandals in the country, Novonor (formerly Odebrecht) has been working in recent months to break market resistance and maintain the viability of its business. Under the judicial reorganization and almost R$ 100 billion declared debts, the Bahia group is still finding it difficult to dispose of essential assets and to resume the OEC (Odebrecht Engineering and Construction) work contracts that originated the conglomerate and will return to be the key business of the group after the sale of the petrochemical company Braskem.

In an interview with Valor, the company's CEO, José Mauro Carneiro da Cunha, and Héctor Nuñez, chairman of the group's board of directors, recognize the barriers to the return are significant. "On the one hand, we are in the process of disposing of assets and, on the other, accelerating the growth agenda," says Nuñez.

Another major difficulty is access to credit and rebuilding the company's image, renamed Novonor at the end of last year, in the market."The judicial reorganization process is well structured. We are going to make payments with the (cash) generation of the companies' operations, growth and sale of assets", says Cunha. The executive joined the group in 2019 to chair the company's board of directors.

In April of this year, Cunha, who went through the problematic Oi, was named president of Novonor. He is not entirely unknown to the family as he had already worked at Braskem between 2003 and 2005 on the petrochemical board, which he currently chairs. Héctor Nuñez, who headed Walmart and RiHappy in Brazil and, being an executive at Coca-Cola, assumed the command of the company's board of directors.

Read the full story (in Portuguese).

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