“Lula never promised that fuel prices would never rise again”

When talking about the fuel readjustment, the president of Petrobras, Jean Paul Prates, said that “Lula never promised that the price would never rise again”. Prates also called the idea created by Lula of promising to “Brazilianize” prices “genius” instead of committing to lowering them during last year’s election campaign.

“President Lula never promised that the price would never rise again, as if he were saying: ‘I’m going to be elected and I’m never going to raise the price of fuel again’ […] There was also no divergence in international prices. The president never said that we are going to completely detach from the international reference, that would be foolhardy, because we not only import part of the products, but we are part of the international community”, said Prates during an interview on Roda Vida, on TV Cultura, last week. Monday (2).

After criticizing the extinct import price parity policy (PPI) and praising Lula’s strategy to address the issue in the campaign, Prates guaranteed that the PT government does not interfere in the current pricing policy practiced by Petrobras.

“The government doesn’t tell us to go up, or down, or hold back, anything like that,” he said.

For the president of the state-owned company, the PPI policy created during the Michel Temer government was “harmful”.

“That was unrealistic, it was applying the price of the worst competitor on the market and guaranteeing its inefficiencies. There, Petrobras lost market sharePetrobras did not react to that imposition, which was absurd”, he stated.