‘Lula government suffers defeat in Petrobras dividend episode’

(JR Guzzo, published in the newspaper The State of S. Paulo on April 27, 2024)

The Lula government ship sank before leaving the port. Without an engine, without fuel and without GPS, and with the crew that the commander put on board, she would not even be able to cross the Ibirapuera lake; the commander, by the way, never knew the difference between the bow and the stern. Of course it really had to sink. Since he assembled his “transition team” with 900 brains and no smart ideas, Lula eliminated any hope, for the Brazilian citizen, that anything could work out in the four years of his government. It is “confirming the readiness”, as they used to say in the racing world; He trained poorly, didn’t show anything and at the time of the race he’s closing the gap.

The BO that Lula and his government’s strategists created around the company’s dividends Petrobras It’s a classic in terms of doing everything you can to make a mistake – and, in the end, not having the competence to even make the intended mistake. Three months ago, in another of his bouts of torrid passion for the “State”, he decided to beat the wallets of Petrobras’ private shareholders, blocking the payment of dividends that they are entitled to receive based on the company’s profits in the last year. He wanted, as always, to stir up hatred against “the rich” who have served him as his personal Judas for 40 years: he called the shareholders, whose only crime was trusting (with their money) a company owned by the sacrosanct Brazilian “State”, “voracious dinosaurs”. . The problem, always humiliating, is that he wanted to steal it and couldn’t carry it.

Three months later, Lula had to accept what the president of Petrobras himself, common honesty and business logic recommended should be done from the beginning – that shareholders receive half of the dividends to which they were entitled. So why all the circus comedy shown so far? It’s one of those cases of defeat that tastes like defeat. The company’s president, who Lula wanted to fire, remains in office. The successor he had already chosen did not leave where he was. The money that Lula wanted to take from shareholders to make “investments” and “generate jobs” was not invested and did not generate a single job – even because Petrobras had no way of doing one thing or another. The idea that “who is really in charge of Petrobras is Lula” turned out to be just nonsense. The dinosaur became tame.

The fundamental nonsense of the “Petrobras crisis” is a high definition photograph of the Lula government – ​​it is so bad that it cannot even execute the stupid decisions it makes. It’s always something. With the fiasco, the company’s largest shareholder ended up receiving his share, which Lula did not want to pay. This shareholder is the National Treasury.

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