Graça Foster late to resign, opposition congressmen say

Petrobras CEO Graça Foster's resignation caused a commotion on Wednesday (Feb 4) among the members of the Chamber of Deputies. For the opposition, Foster, who headed the state-controlled oil giant, was late to make her decision to leave. “We had been asking for it since September,” said Carlos Sampaio, the leading representative of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) in Brazil's lower house, after it was reported that the CEO as well as five senior executives were to resign their posts. In Sampaio's view, he was dismissed for having fulfilled her mission of “wiping the government's slate clean” in the corruption cases in which the firm has been involved.

In a statement, Democrats head Mendonça Filho said that the insistence on keeping Graça Foster as CEO triggered speculations that she had connived at the illicit doings in the company. “First, she denied she had been involved in any irregularities at the state-run firm, and, short afterwards, the Public Prosecution Office reported former directors Nestor Cerveró, Paulo Roberto Costa and Renato Duque as having taken part [in the scheme].”

São Paulo Deputy Paulo Teixeira, from the president's Worker's Party (PT), criticized the statements from opposing coalitions, saying that, even though her resignation had been predicted, it will only cause the new management members to be nominated earlier: “Petrobras had its own calendar, which was the administrative council reshuffle, predicted to take place in March.”

Teixeira says “the discovery of a cartel in Petrobras deprived the current board of directors of its governability. So it is crucial for a company of such dimensions to adopt another type of governance which may put this moment behind it and make Petrobras the world leader in oil , which is its vocation.”

PT head Rui Falcão said that Graça Foster's departure was a decision taken at an opportune moment of “private deliberation”, and that the objective of the opposition is to privatize the company and remove it from its status as “sole operator in pre-salt oil exploitation”. Falcão added: “We must preserve Petrobras's countrywide policies; they generate employment and ensure the growth of the country.”

The members of Petrobras's new board of directors will only be announced during the meeting with the Administrative Council, slated for Friday (6), as reported by the firm itself.

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira