General meeting of shareholders to elect board members will be held on August 19
07/19/2022
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Petrobras headquarters in Rio — Foto: Leo Pinheiro/Valor
Petrobras’s Board of Directors approved on Monday, unanimously, the report of the Eligibility Committee (Celeg) that considered ineligible two candidates nominated by the Bolsonaro administration to be directors of the state-owned company: the executive secretary of the Chief of Staff Office, Jônathas Castro, and the attorney general of the National Treasury, Ricardo Soriano. According to Celeg, there is an indication of a conflict of interest between the positions held by the executives in the government and the performance on the board.
This way, the board also ended up rejecting the names of the two nominees. They will not be submitted by the board to the shareholders’ meeting. Now, the decision of whether to keep or replace the vetoed names is up to the federal government, which can insist on the two nominations, submitting the names directly to the meeting, to be held on August 19.
The other seven candidates for the company’s board meet the requirements and are not barred from running for the seats, Celeg concluded. This is the case of the nominees by the minority shareholders, José João Abdalla and Marcelo Gasparino, as well as the other five nominees by the federal government: Gileno Barreto; Edison Garcia; Ieda Gagni; Ruy Schneider; and Márcio Weber.
Once elected, they will join Rosângela Buzanelli, nominated by the oil company’s employees, as well as Marcelo Mesquita and Francisco Petros, nominated by minority shareholders and elected in a separate vote.
In all, eight diverse representatives will be elected to the Petrobras board. The goal is to fill vacancies chosen through the multiple vote system at the last meeting, last April.
When one of the directors elected by this mechanism leaves the board, all the others chosen by the same system must also go through a new election.
The minority shareholders’ nominees, as well as Mr. Weber and Mr. Schneider, are running for re-election. Caio Paes de Andrade, the current CEO of the state-owned company, is also running for one of the seats.
Mr. Andrade already occupies an interim seat on the board, left by the former CEO, José Mauro Coelho, who resigned for both positions in June. Mr. Coelho was fired after the federal government criticized the fuel price increases at the state-owned company’s refineries.
*By Gabriela Ruddy e Fábio Couto — Rio de Janeiro
Source: Valor International