Brazil yesterday announced rules governing potentially enormous reserves of oil discovered off its coast in the past two years. The finds have been compared by industry leaders with the North Sea stocks of the 1970s that transformed the global oil industry.
The announcement by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president, answered questions about the role of the Brazilian state in exploiting the reserves but postponed the politically difficult question of how to divide revenues between the country's states and municipalities.
