A man walks past Petrobras headquarters in Rio de Janeiro in September 2020.RICARDO MORAES / Reuters
Shares of Petrobras, the oil company controlled by the Brazilian government, fell 16.9% this Monday at the opening of the São Paulo Stock Exchange while the general index fell almost 5% and the dollar rose.
The Brazilian falls are in addition to the 10% losses recorded hours earlier by the shares listed in New York and the 7% lost in the São Paulo market on Friday at the end of the day after President Jair Bolsonaro announced on Facebook that intends to impose a retired general as the next president of Petrobras.
The president is unhappy with the increases in gasoline and diesel, a major issue for the powerful truckers sector, in which he has many faithful.
Given that the Government controls 50.26% of Petrobras, Bolsonaro intends to place Joaquim Silva e Luna, a military man who was Minister of Defense and president since 2019 of the Itaipú hydroelectric plant, on the border with Argentina and Paraguay, to the presidency.
The Petrobras board of directors, where the Executive has a majority among the 11 directors, will decide this Tuesday whether to assume that the president of the republic imposes the company's chief executive to replace Roberto Castello Branco, whose efforts to privatize refineries and cut back debt have made him an investor favorite.
Petrobras closed 2019 with a profit of more than 40,000 million reais (9,000 million dollars, almost 8,500 million euros), the largest in its history.
And the second in positive since the mega corruption scandal that caused a political and economic earthquake in Brazil.