Government elects rejects to Petrobras’ board of directors

The government overrode Petrobras’ governance rules and elected to the state-owned company’s board of directors two names rejected by the internal committee and by the collegiate itself due to conflict of interest.

The election took place at a meeting held this Friday (19). The names rejected by the council were Jônathas Assunção and Ricardo Soriano. The first is number two in the Ministry of the Civil House and the second, head of the PGFN (Procuradoria Geral da Fazenda Nacional).

The two did not even appear on the initial list of candidates approved by the board of directors last month, having been included only at the beginning of the assembly by the representative of the Union, the prosecutor of the National Treasury Ivo Cordeiro Pinho Timbó.

He argued that opinions from the AGU (Advocacy-General of the Union) and the Ethics Commission of the Presidency of the Republic guarantee that there are no legal barriers to the two nominations. Owner of most of the shares with voting rights, the Union guaranteed the election of the two.

“There is a brutal conflict of interests between the functions they perform in the federal government and the position of board member of Petrobras,” said Fernando Siqueira, director of Aepet (Association of Engineers of Petrobras), during the meeting.

He argued that the Civil House ministry contributes to the formulation of policies that affect Petrobras and that the PGFN is a counterpart in billion-dollar tax lawsuits against the state-owned company. “This constitutes a spurious intervention by the government in the administration of Petrobras, contrary to the State-owned Companies Law.”

The assembly elected representatives for eight of the 11 seats on Petrobras’ board of directors. The government nominated eight names, but lost two disputes to representatives of the largest individual shareholder of the state-owned company, Banco Clássico.

These vacancies will be filled by the bank’s owner, João José Abdalla Filho — also known as Juca Abdalla — and by lawyer Marcelo Gasparino, who usually represents the bank on boards of directors.

In addition to Assunção and Soriano, the government elected Gileno Gurjão Barreto, who will chair the board, Edison Garcia, Iêda Cagni and the current president of Petrobras, Caio Paes de Andrade.

The list is made up mostly of public office holders, in a government strategy to have a more aligned council in the state-owned company. It is the first time since the Dilma Rousseff government, for example, that an occupant of the Planalto Palace has been elected to the collegiate body.

For experts, the government’s strategy violates the State-Owned Companies Law, which tightened the rules for appointments in government-controlled companies to reduce the risks of political intervention. The law prohibits the appointment of political agents and those with possible conflicts of interest.

“The law was made precisely to provide instruments both to internal governance bodies and to all other inspection and control bodies to take action when there are indications of some type of illegality”, evaluates one of those responsible for drafting the law, Sylvio Coelho .

The insistence on names rejected by internal governance bodies led Anapetro (National Association of Petroleum Workers Minority Shareholders of Petrobras) to request suspension of the meeting at the CVM (Securities Commission), but the request was denied.

“The CVM understood that Anapetro’s request was untimely and that it had vices and formal deficiencies”, said the state-owned company, in a note released this Wednesday (17). The association says it will ask for reconsideration of the case after approval of the names.