05/19/2021 12:59 AM
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 05/19/2021 3:05 AM
Pablo González, president of YPF, assured on Tuesday night that there will be no more increases
in gasoline prices during 2021, and tried to justify the strong increases that the company applied in recent months, which accumulated
70% since August last year.
The
twelve increases of the last nine months
were greater than those of inflation and the price of the dollar in the same period of time.
Asked if it is true that the state company will not make a new adjustment, he replied: "Yes, we have been announcing it for more than two and a half months, when we announced the investment plan and established a
predictability horizon
."
The former deputy governor of Alicia Kirchner in Santa Cruz also
justified the increases
, although he regretted them: "If we had been able to avoid it, obviously we would have avoided it."
The increases were applied, according to González, "taking into account
the need for YPF
to produce and inject into the Gas Plan, and also the amount of barrels of crude that YPF needs to sustain the supply of this strategic good, taking into account that it sells 55% of the fuel in Argentina ".
"YPF allocates 100% of its production to the domestic market, it does not export, and it also has to
withstand the pressure
of a highly volatile commodity such as crude oil, which is obviously priced in dollars," he said, in dialogue with C5N.
The president of the state oil company stressed that with these increases it
is guaranteed that there is a supply
of oil and gas that Argentina needs for its productive apparatus. "
He shot against the macrista management
After his justification for the increases, which since August 2020 amounted to 70%, Pablo González used the
criticism
of the management of energy policy during the presidency of Mauricio Macri to defend the current one.
He recalled that "YPF comes with
drops in production in the last 5 years
", something that he assured that it will be reversed this year.
On the other hand, he was
very hard
on Juan José Aranguren, who was Minister of Energy during the Macrista government.
"If you put a person who
went to bed
one day
being the CEO of Shell
, and the next day he woke up being Secretary of Energy, I don't think that what he slept on that night will change his mentality," he said.
Then, he recounted what happened with the company he now manages in those years: "Production fell during the 4 years. Of gas, 8%, oil 10%, and the most important thing is that investment fell by 35% ".
"If you do not invest, obviously your reserves and production are going to fall. An industry sector was privileged through some tools, to the detriment of
a YPF emptied of content
and without an energy policy," González concluded.
DB
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