A second payout from the Petrobras Fair Fund, the pot of money collected after the Brazilian oil company misled investors, was ordered by the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 23. The order sends $6,414,906.46 to harmed investors through the fund’s administrator. It reaches 6,950 people who were already paid once in 2023, and it pays 10 investors who filed late. The rate is small, 0.373% of each person’s recognized loss, because the money is built from leftovers: uncashed checks, undeliverable payments and a transfer of $342,880.86 from a Treasury account.
Who gets the second Petrobras payment
The order, signed by SEC Secretary Vanessa A. Countryman, names two groups. The first is 6,950 eligible claimants who were paid in the first round and now receive an additional 0.373% of their Recognized Claim, the loss figure the fund’s plan calculates for each investor. The second is 10 investors who filed late claims. They get 4.9% of their Recognized Claim, which the order describes as the amount they would have received had they claimed on time, and together they receive $4,492.64. Seven of the ten also qualify for the additional payment, which has to top the fund’s $10 minimum.
For investors who bought Petrobras American depositary shares between March 1, 2010 and April 22, 2015, the question is whether a check is coming. Nothing has to be filed. The September 23 order sets no new claims window and pays people the fund has already approved, with Epiq Systems, the Fund Administrator, sending the payments. An investor whose address changed since 2023 is the person most likely to miss a check, because payments that cannot be delivered go back into the fund.
Investors who are not sure whether a Petrobras payment belongs to them can use The Settlement & Refund Recovery System, which includes the four-date rule for reading a settlement notice and a claim log and payment tracker for sorting what arrived from what is still pending.
Open the Petrobras fair fund notice rule and payment log →
The first round was far larger. The SEC authorized it on September 18, 2023, and it paid 39,688 claimants 4.962% of their claims, a total of $91,645,380.17. The second round reaches only 6,950 of those investors, less than a fifth of them, and the gap is a function of the leftover money: a payout this small only clears the $10 minimum for people whose Recognized Claim is large enough. Across the 6,950, the order works out to roughly $922 per person on average, though individual checks scale with each investor’s own loss.
Where the $6.4 million came from
As of March 31, 2026, the Petrobras Fair Fund still held $6,414,906.48, according to the order, including money from undeliverable payments and uncashed checks from the first round. Of that, $6,072,025.62 sits in a Huntington Bank escrow account. The order directs Commission staff to move another $342,880.86 held by the Commission into that escrow, and then directs the Fund Administrator to distribute a total of $6,414,906.46 to harmed investors under the plan. In plain terms, most of this payout is money that failed to reach people the first time.
The plan approved in 2021 anticipated exactly this. Under the distribution plan, payments go out by check or electronic transfer to the beneficial owner of the account, and checks become void 90 days after they are issued. Voided money stays in the Fair Fund. Leftover funds may then be spread pro rata among eligible claimants who cashed a check, and residual funds are returned to the U.S. Treasury. A third round is therefore possible on paper, though the SEC has not announced one.
The cash-a-check condition is why the first round matters. For the 6,950 investors in the second round, the two payouts add up to 5.335% of their Recognized Claim: 4.962% in 2023 and 0.373% now. The new check will be about 7.5% of the size of the earlier one, which gives anyone with a 2023 payment record a quick way to see whether the amount is in the right range.
The 2018 case behind the fund
The fund traces to a September 27, 2018 settlement in which Petrobras agreed to pay $933 million in disgorgement, prejudgment interest and penalty to resolve SEC charges. The Commission’s press release put the penalty at $853 million, subject to offsets for related class-action settlements and for payments to Brazilian law enforcement. It said senior executives worked with major contractors to inflate infrastructure project costs by billions of dollars and shared kickbacks with Brazilian politicians, overstating assets by about $2.5 billion.
Steven Peikin, then co-director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, said at the time that Petrobras “fraudulently raised billions of dollars from U.S. investors while its senior executives operated a massive, undisclosed bribery and corruption scheme.” The charges centered on a $10 billion stock offering in 2010 that carried false statements about the company’s assets, projects, management integrity and government relationships. The press release said a Fair Fund was established to return penalty proceeds to harmed investors.
The SEC’s 2021 approval order put the amount Petrobras paid into the Fair Fund at $85,320,000, with interest added in an account that earned money while the plan was drawn up. That is a small slice of the headline $933 million, and the two payouts so far have returned about $98 million to investors in total counting the first round and this one. The shortfall between the original penalty and the fund is the part of the story the 2026 order does not revisit.
Tracking a Petrobras fair fund payment
The SEC keeps the approved plan on its Petrobras Fair Fund distribution plan page, which is the free place to confirm how the money is paid and who administers it. The plan names Epiq Systems as Fund Administrator and Miller Kaplan Arase LLP as tax administrator. Investors who held Petrobras shares through a broker should expect the payment to be made to the beneficial account owner, not necessarily to the name on an old paper certificate, so brokerage statements are the first place to look.
Two numbers make a payment easy to check. The first-round payment was 4.962% of the Recognized Claim, and the second is 0.373%, so a 2023 amount multiplied by about 0.075 gives the expected size of the new check. Late claimants are different: their 4.9% payment is a first payment, and 10 people share $4,492.64 between them. A check that comes in far from those ratios is a reason to call the Fund Administrator, not to assume an error.
The open question is what happens to whatever is left after this round. The plan lets the SEC either spread leftover money again among investors who cashed checks or send it back to the Treasury, and the September 23 order does not say which, nor does it give a payment date. Checks that go uncashed within 90 days return to the fund, so the size of any third round depends on how many of these 6,950 investors cash theirs.
Anyone logging a Petrobras check next to other settlement money can use The Settlement & Refund Recovery System: its claim log and payment tracker records what arrived and when, and it explains how to get an expired or uncashed settlement check reissued.
Get The Settlement & Refund Recovery System for the Petrobras fair fund →
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by The Money Overview’s editorial team.
