Pronampe: Chamber approves payment in 6 years – 03/01/2023 – Market

The Chamber of Deputies approved this Wednesday (1st) a provisional measure that extends the term for loan payments from Pronampe (National Support Program for Micro and Small Businesses) from 48 months to 72 months.

The vote was symbolic and no congressman was against the text. The proposal needs to be approved by the Senate by April 5, the date on which the provisional measure should expire.

The MP with the new rules for Pronampe was edited by former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) three days before the second round of elections. The program was created during the pandemic to help micro and small businesses and had its deadline extended until the end of 2024.

The rapporteur for the proposal, Deputy Yuri Paredão (PL-CE), made changes to the text sent by the government. The main change was the definition that the loan will have a minimum grace period of 12 months.

The parliamentarian also decided to maintain the ceiling for the program’s interest, which is the Selic rate plus 6%. The percentage, according to the approved text, will be defined by the Secretariat for Micro and Small Companies and Entrepreneurship of the Ministry of Industry.

The government base voted in favor of the proposal, but criticized the fact that the Selic rate was linked to the program’s interest. The position was placed in the wake of criticism that allies of the Lula government (PT) have made to the president of the Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto, for maintaining the Selic at 13.75%.

“Our intention, evidently, is to vote in favor of the matter. We are only asking the rapporteur for explanations about the pegging of the Selic, on account of the absurdity that has been a president of the Central Bank who raises rates to heights in an evident boycott process” , said Deputy Glauber Braga (PSOL-RJ).

The rapporteur, however, said that “there is no reason to release” the Pronampe interest from the Selic, which is used as the basis for defining rates by financial institutions.

The program originally established a maximum annual interest rate equal to the Selic, plus 1.25% for contracts signed until December 2020. For those signed from January 2021, the ceiling rose to Selic plus 6%.

At the time the MP was published, the then Minister Paulo Guedes (Economy) justified the initiative in the statement of reasons, stating that the ceiling had been “limiting the performance” of the portfolio and that it was necessary to promote “better distribution of program resources”.

That’s because the ministry had detected a concentration of the program’s credit concessions in small companies, while microbusinesses and individual microentrepreneurs were left with smaller slices of operations.