Petrobras achieves the greatest benefit in its history thanks to the sale of assets

The Brazilian state oil company Petrobras won last year more than 40,000 million reais (9,000 million dollars, almost 8,500 million euros), which is the biggest annual benefit in its history. The company has presented its 2019 financial balance sheet on Wednesday, after the closure of the Brazilian Stock Exchange, when a third of its employees meet their 19th strike in protest against the closure of a fertilizer plant and the subsequent layoffs. To the bulky profits it has contributed that, since the arrival to power of Jair Bolsonaro, liberal in economy, the State has sold an important part of its actions in which it is still the largest public company in the country.

The benefits are due to state disinvestment with the sale of shares worth 6,000 million - part of the plans to lose weight in the State - that were in the hands of two public banks and the sale of oil fields and other assets, Petrobras said. The president of the company. Roberto Castello Branco, stressed that state disinvestment has "helped to make viable the focus on the assets of which we are natural owners" and has allowed him to invest more in exploratory areas of the so-called pre-salt, immense reserves discovered under a thick layer of salt in the Atlantic

This record profit consolidates the change in trend registered a year earlier. Petrobras then returned to profits after four years in red numbers since the corruption scandal it named broke out in the company's waterline. Investigations and decisions about the mega-case continue both in Brazil and abroad. On Wednesday, a judge has sentenced two former Petrobras directors to pay each half a million reais to the company's workforce for moral damages caused by corrupt practices. The two convicted are collaborating with justice. The Odebrecht case , derived from the Petrobras case , has led to the arrest in Spain only a few days ago of former Mexican director Pemex Emilio Lozoya, accused of collecting bribes from the construction company.

Petrobras' profit at the end of the last year represents an increase of 55% compared to 2018, but without extraordinary sales, it would be around then. Last year's earnings are, according to the company, with the barrel at $ 64 in 2019 compared to $ 71 in the previous year. After years of stagnation, production has also recovered to stand at three million barrels a day between oil and gas.

The strike of 21,000 of the 63,000 employees of the state, which raises the risk of shortages in Brazil, continues despite a judge cautiously annulled on Tuesday the dismissals that motivated her. Those affected are 400 state employees and another 600 workers from subsidiary companies that worked at a newly closed fertilizer plant in Paraná. More than 121 Petrobras centers are on strike between production platforms, refineries and terminals.

The main parties of the leftist opposition, the Workers Party (PT) of Lula da Silva and the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), support the tankers' strike while trying to turn it into a platform against the broad privatization program designed by the economic czar, Paulo Guedes.