Petrobras: No intervention, says company president – 05/16/2023 – Market

The president of Petrobras, Jean Paul Prates, dismisses the reading that the end of the import parity as a benchmark for the price of oil could be interpreted as a government intervention in the company.

“There is no intervention, absolutely none,” said Prates at a press conference this Tuesday (16), after the announcement of the change in the readjustment rule and the announcement of reductions in fuel prices.

“There is no intervention in the sense of saying ‘put the price like this’. No. Petrobras’ instruments, the company’s competitiveness and profitability, are fully guaranteed. What we are talking about here is a model that will guarantee it to have the best price for your customer, like any other company.”

According to Prates, the proposal to adopt a new readjustment system for fuel prices in the domestic market was announced during the campaign by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and was approved at the polls.

“President Lula, when he ran the campaign, said what I’m saying here: it doesn’t make sense for a country to fight for self-sufficiency, it doesn’t make sense for all [os presidentes] since Getúlio [Vargas] fight to have a refining park and, later, we practice the imported price as if we imported 100%.”

The calculation of the PPI (Import Parity Price) worked as a kind of guarantee that the government did not interfere in fuel prices, since it was based on a fixed formula.

Despite some specialists criticizing the extinction of the mechanism, the new proposal was considered positive by market analysts. In reading this segment, the worst scenario did not materialize, which would be the non-adoption of a new rule, with a simple return to the past.

Petrobras shares advanced 5.11%, at R$ 26.97, after the announcement of the new commercial strategy.

As an immediate result of the review, Prates also announced that the price of gasoline at the state-owned refineries will drop 12.6%, or R$ 0.40 per liter. The price of diesel will be reduced by 12.8%, or R$ 0.44 per liter. Already the price of kitchen gas will fall 21.3%, or R$ 8.97 per cylinder of 13 kilos.