Outgoing Senator Jean Paul Prates announced as next Petrobras CEO

Jean Paul Prates. Photo: Waldemir Barreto/SF

President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Friday confirmed that Senator Jean Paul Prates will be the next chief executive of Brazilian oil and gas giant Petrobras. As with most nominations of the upcoming administration, his name was already widely circulated in the press in off-the-record stories, and the official announcement came as no surprise.

A member of Lula’s Workers’ Party, Mr. Prates took office as a senator early in 2019 as the understudy to Fátima Bezerra, who left Congress after being elected governor in Rio Grande do Norte. He did not seek re-election this year, although he did run as an understudy on a losing ticket.

Mr. Prates has extensive experience in the energy industry, in both the public and private sectors. In the late 1980s, he worked at the legal department for Petrobras’ international contracts.

He founded and worked for over 23 years at Expetro, an energy and natural resources consulting group. He also served a two-year stint as Energy Secretary in Rio Grande do Norte, his political home state.

Mr. Prates, aged 54, recently told the press that Petrobras’s pricing policy will be “adjusted” to the upcoming government’s directions. Currently, prices are pegged to the international market — with a few caveats.

With one eye on his re-election campaign, outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro put pressure on Petrobras to lower energy prices for months — and swapped out the company CEO three times in just over a year until that started to happen.

For at least several weeks before the election, Petrobras was shown to be selling fuel below the import parity price.

Mr. Bolsonaro also sponsored legislation restricting state-level taxes and suspended federal ones on fuels — legislation that expires at the end of the year. A think tank recently estimated a 14-percent hike in gasoline prices at the turn of the year with the return of federal taxes.