FILE PHOTO: Brazil’s Infrastructure Minister Tarcisio Freitas is pictured during a meeting of the LIDE (Businessmen Leaders Group) in Campos do Jordao, Brazil, April 5, 2019. REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli
April 16, 2019
By Lisandra Paraguassu and Jake Spring
BRASILIA (Reuters) – Petroleo Brasileiro SA’s market-based diesel pricing policy remains unchanged and Brazil’s president has no intention of meddling in the firm’s internal affairs, high-ranking government officials said on Tuesday.
A call by President Jair Bolsonaro last week to the chief executive of Petrobras, as the firm is known, led the company to call off a sharp diesel price increase and revived investor fears about political influence on the company, hammering its share price.
The episode underscored the leverage of truckers in Brazil, which relies overwhelmingly on road freight to get agricultural exports to port and keep its economy humming. It left investors doubting the liberal bona fides of Bolsonaro’s government, which has decried state interventionism under some of its predecessors.
After a meeting of high-ranking officials in Brasilia on Tuesday, the government sought to portray the Friday incident as a one-time event and said Petrobras can choose when and how to adjust fuel prices, which has not been the practice under previous governments.
“I cannot and I will not interfere in Petrobras,” Bolsonaro said in a written statement, read aloud by presidential spokesman Otavio Rego Barros.
In separate comments, Economy Minister Paulo Guedes acknowledged that Bolsonaro had been responding to political concerns when he called Petrobras Chief Executive Officer Roberto Castello Branco last week. He said, however, that the government was now committed to full price autonomy at the state-run firm.
The comments will come as a relief to investors in Petrobras. While his economic team is led by free-market advocates, Bolsonaro, who for years pressed for heavy state involvement in Brazil’s economy, is a newcomer to liberal economic ideas.
A truckers’ strike over high diesel prices last year paralyzed Brazil’s economy for weeks, led to the departure of the then-CEO at Petrobras, and handicapped an already unpopular government.
Bolsonaro, who took power in January, was one of the most prominent politicians to throw his weight behind truckers’ complaints last year and has been sensitive to their demands.
At a news conference earlier on Tuesday, presidential Chief of Staff Onyx Lorenzoni and Infrastructure Minister Tarcisio Freitas pledged 500 million reais ($129 million) in loans from a state bank for independent truckers and announced other measures designed to avoid a threatened strike. Lorenzoni and Freitas did not address the truckers’ underlying complaint about fuel prices, however.
Preferred shares of Petrobras closed up 3.05 percent, though the gains occurred largely before the government’s comments.
(Reporting by Ricardo Brito; Writing and additional reporting by Gram Slattery; Editing by Dan Grebler and Tom Brown)
