Former director-general of the ANP says that gasoline should rise sharply after elections

In the assessment of the former director general of the National Petroleum Agency (ANP) David Zylbersztajn, the price of fuel should suffer a sharp rise after the elections, with the realignment to the international market. In an interview with CNN this Saturday (23), the former director said that there seems to be an order at Petrobras not to change prices until the election.

Zylbersztajn criticized the reduction in fuel prices for consumers in the country. He called the government’s move to lower prices “artificial.” “The fact that we are cheaper means that if we need to import, someone will have to pay the difference. If it’s not the consumer, it’s either going to be Petrobras or the government,” he points out.

For him, it is possible that “after the elections, we will have a strong realignment of fuel prices, depending on how the international market behaves”, he said.

The former director mentioned that two movements impacted fuel prices in recent weeks. The first was the fall in the price of oil. Brent came to be below US$ 100. On the other hand, the recent depreciation of the real against the dollar pushes prices up.

“This clash between the fall in oil and the depreciation of the real is what will determine whether it has to increase, decrease or leave it stable. My impression is that the appreciation of the dollar was more expressive than the price of a barrel”, says the former director of the ANP.

For him, instead of an artificial solution, the government could find a way out that, structurally, solves the problem. Zylbersztajn also disapproved of the reduction of ICMS in the states.

“You can’t, in the brusque way it was done, cut state revenue. It even shocks the passivity of most governors,” she says. According to the former director of the ANP, if there was a reduction in the tax, it should take place “in the context of a greater tax reform, in an organized way, with a strategy and with a deadline for implementation”.

“The impact of this with the reduction of state revenue will be when school lunches are lacking, investment in public safety is lacking, investment is lacking to repair equipment in hospitals,” says Zylbersztajn.