To: 2MAR$ who wrote (83284 ) 11/20/2011 5:03:25 AM From: elmatador Respond to of 218578 This is what a South version of Steve Jobs look like: "consider that Marcio Mello, Mr. Optimism, is wearing Crocs — yes, the moulded, perforated, jellylike footwear — with his navy blue pinstripe suit. They are ugly. His proper shoes are in his desk drawer. My pumps are encased in little white operating-theatre booties, a requirement of all visitors — there’s a machine right inside the front door of HRT Oil & Gas into which you place one foot, then the other, and voila, disposable booties envelop each shoe. The booties are ridiculous. To state it gently, this is odd. A more generous observation: the freedom of being one’s own boss accommodates the fulfilled expression of such fetishes, including a distaste for what dirt will do to an off-white corporate carpet, not to mention Mello’s preference for prefacing an annual report with the unconventionally swooning statement: “One look makes you discover love.” ... Mello, a petroleum geologist with a PhD in molecular geochemistry, launched a handful of companies before creating HRT. He took HRT public last autumn in an initial public offering that raised 2.5 billion reais (about $1.4 billion). The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan took a small stake in the HRT exploration story, which is chiefly focused on the hunt for oil and gas in two regions: the Solimões sedimentary basin in the Amazonian rainforest, and a vast holding of close to 100,000 square kilometres off the coast of Namibia, a geological match, Mello believes, with Petrobras’s own deep-water successes off the Brazilian coast. In late October, HRT announced an agreement with a Brazilian subsidiary of Russia’s TNK-BP, through which TNK gained a 45-per-cent stake in Solimões in exchange for $1-billion. It all sounds so upbeat.