The nomination of PT senator Jean Paul Prates, 54, for the presidency of Petrobras should be voted on this Thursday (26) at a meeting of the oil company’s board of directors, the company said in a statement to the market published on Wednesday (25) .
The expectation is that his name will be approved by the members of the collegiate, made up of directors appointed by the government, minority shareholders and employees.
Prates, who was chosen and announced by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the end of December, has 30 years of experience in the oil and energy market, in addition to working in the areas of sustainable energy and energy transition, and was a member, in past, from Lula’s transition team to Mines and Energy.
He entered politics in Congress in 2014, when he was elected as the first alternate for Senator Fátima Bezerra (PT-RN). He went on to occupy Fatima’s chair as a senator in 2019, after she was elected and, in 2022, re-elected governor of Rio Grande do Norte.
Prates is a lawyer and economist, with master’s degrees in the areas of energy and environmental management from the University of Pennsylvania (in the United States) and the French Petroleum Institute, according to information on his official website.
He joined the legal advisory department of Petrobras Internacional (Braspetro) in the late 1980s and, in the 1990s, founded his own oil consultancy.
He provided consultancy services to the government of Rio Grande do Norte and, between 2008 and 2010, headed the state’s Energy Secretariat.
Currently, he continued as the owner of at least two companies in the area – which, according to the State-owned Law, would be an impediment to taking over as president of the Brazilian oil giant.
In his role in the Senate, he was author of the law that regulates the capture and storage of carbon, rapporteur of the Legal Framework for Railways, of the new laws on the production of biogas in landfills and of the new law on sustainable urban mobility.
He was also rapporteur for two bills aimed at intervening in the price of fuel and altering the taxation of the sector. The two texts are stalled in the Chamber of Deputies.
Prates defended that Petrobras increase its investments in renewables, in line with other global oil companies, and also in the refining area – which was being sold by Petrobras and has already had the monopoly of the state-owned company challenged by the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade).
The senator has already positioned himself against the privatization of the company and has also questioned Petrobras’ current pricing policy, which currently follows international quotations to define its domestic prices.
“Who defines the price policy for anything in the country, if it will intervene or not, if it will be free or not, if it will be international or not, is the government”, said Jean Paul after one of the first meetings of the technical group, in the end of November.
“What we have to undo once and for all is to say that Petrobras is the one who defines fuel price policy”, said Jean Paul after one of the first meetings of the technical group, at the end of November.”
*With information from Fernanda Pinotti and Emanuelle Leones, from CNN, and Reuters
Source: CNN Brasil
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