Grupo Cosan announces purchase of stake in Vale

Cosan, a company controlled by businessman Rubens Ometto, announced this Friday (7th) the purchase of 4.9% of the capital of Vale, the second largest Brazilian company. In a note, the company also informed that it intends to increase its participation in the mining company.

“This move is another step in the company’s portfolio diversification journey, investing in irreplicable assets in sectors in which Brazil has a clear competitive advantage,” said Cosan, in a statement to the market.

The company did not detail the value of the operation, saying only that it will be financed by lines of credit that include the private issuance of commercial notes and financing linked to derivative instruments.

Considering the closing value of this Thursday’s trading session (6), the operation would move something around R$ 17 billion. The announcement of the operation dropped the value of Cosan’s shares, which fell 7.5% around 4:30 pm this Friday.

Vale is today a corporation without a controller. Its largest shareholders are the pension fund Previ, with 8.61%, Capital World Investors (6.69%), BlackRock (6.33%) and Mitsui (5.99%). With the acquisition announced this Friday, Cosan becomes the fifth largest shareholder in the company.

After two tragedies with dam failures in Minas Gerais, Vale recovered with the rise in the price of iron ore and recorded in 2021 the biggest profit in the history of Brazilian companies, of R$ 121 billion.

Rubens Ometto’s group was born in agribusiness, with the production of sugarcane, and today has operations in oil and gas, transport, renewable energy and carbon credits. He is the owner or partner of the brands Raízen, Rumo and Compass, among others.

Compass, which controls the piped gas distributor Comgás, had great growth in the last year with the purchase of the Rio Grande do Sul distributor Sulgás and Gaspetro, a subsidiary of Petrobras with a stake in 19 other distributors across the country.

This operation generated great questioning in the market due to the negotiating power it will give the buyer: if it retains all the stakes, it would control two-thirds of the country’s natural gas purchases. Some of them, however, will be sold.

In the statement issued this Friday, Cosan said that it is going to CADE (Administrative Council for Economic Defense) to seek approval to expand its stake in Vale beyond the 4.9% already acquired.

The company’s controller, Rubens Ometto, has stood out in recent years as the largest donor of electoral campaigns in Brazil. It was like that in 2018, when he put BRL 7.5 million, and it is like that in 2022, with BRL 5.7 million already invested in candidates.