A U.S. judge earlier this month kept alive a lawsuit against Brazil’s Petrobras in part because he doubted the state-led oil company’s contention that some assurances it made about ethics and governance amounted to “mere puffery.”
District Judge Jed Rakoff, of Manhattan federal court, described puffery as a sort of harmless corporate bragging. To be defined as puffery, such statements, he wrote, would have to be “too general to cause a reasonable investor to rely upon them.”
If that is the case, they are “inactionable,” or not grounds for a lawsuit, he said, adding that a trial would determine where and if Petrobras’ puffery defense is valid.
Brazil Energy Insight 
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