Petrobras’ board maintains rejection of Bolsonaro’s nominees

The Petrobras board of directors accepted the opinion of the state-owned internal committee and maintained the rejection of two of the eight nominated by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) for the renewal of the collegiate. The decision to take the names to the vote or not is now up to the Union.

In a meeting this Monday (18), the board of the state-owned company scheduled for August 18 the assembly that will elect the new names of the collegiate, part of the government’s effort to reduce resistance to political interventions in the company.

Last Thursday (14), the Eligibility Committee of the company evaluated that Jhonatas Assunção and Ricardo Soriano received negative opinions. The first is number two for the Minister of the Civil House, Ciro Nogueira, and the second, the Attorney General of the National Treasury.

In the opinion of the committee responsible for analyzing CVs of nominees to the state-owned company, the two appointments create a risk of conflict between the interests of Petrobras and the interests of the controlling shareholder. Therefore, the group understood that there are prohibitions to its appointments.

Company sources assess, however, that the government can disregard the opinions and keep the names on the list of nominees that will be evaluated at the meeting. The government has nominated eight names. Among them, only two already participate in the collegiate: Márcio Weber and Ruy Flacks Schneider.

The other six are the company’s president, Caio Paes de Andrade, Assunção and Soriano, and Ieda Cagni, Edison Garcia and Gileno Gurjão Barreto, appointed to chair the board.

Like Assunção and Soriano, the last three are holders of public administration positions, which is also the subject of questioning. The approval of the names had reservations that they do not operate in operations related to the state-owned company.

In an effort to reduce resistance from the board of directors, the list presented by the government differs from all other board renewals since the end of Dilma Rousseff’s administration, by prioritizing names linked to public administration instead of names from the financial and oil markets.

Petrobras’ board of directors has 11 seats. Currently, the government occupies six, as it lost two to the company’s largest private shareholder, Banco Clássico, at the last shareholders’ meeting.

Two others are occupied by representatives of minority shareholders and the last one, by representatives of the state-owned company’s employees, who maintain their mandates.

The two representatives of Banco Clássico, banker João José Abdalla Filho and lawyer Marcelo Gasparino, who had been elected at the last meeting, in April, will also compete for seats in August.

The minutes of the Petrobras board of directors meeting that evaluated the names have not yet been released. The company has not yet released a statement to the market about its results.