Mr. Ferreira had been on temporary leave from Petrobras since Sept. 14, Though he had only been at the company since an April shake-up, few had expected Mr. Ferreira to return after word of possible disagreements with Chief Executive Aldemir Bendine seeped out of Petrobras’s boardroom. For most of this month, Mr. Ferreira’s time has been consumed by the fallout from a catastrophic dam failure at Samarco Mineração SA, a joint venture between Vale and Australian miner BHP Billiton Ltd. BHP -1.11 % The Nov. 5 accident killed as many as 13 people, left another eight missing and polluted hundreds of miles of rivers in southeastern Brazil. Vale and BHP have sought to brush off legal responsibility for the disaster while contributing to recovery efforts. But Brazil’s attorney general’s office on Friday announced a 20 billion real ($5.2 billion) civil lawsuit against Samarco “and its controllers,” as the latter […]