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RIO DE JANEIRO — The senator shuffled his papers and ran through a list: Five separate federal investigations into corruption. Wild overpayments for new facilities. A monstrous debt.
“We are not talking here about the local grocery store, but about the biggest company in Brazil,” Pedro Taques said when the government summoned the chief executive of the national oil company to an inquiry into its operations a few weeks ago. “How can a company this size commit these kinds of mistakes?”
The CEO stiffened visibly at the question. “Petrobras is not, it is not, a local grocery store,” Maria das Graças Silva Foster said sternly, her dark eyebrows drawn down into a V. “Petrobras is an absolutely serious oil company, distinct from other oil companies throughout the world, due to the challenges it faces every day.”
The woes of Petroleo Brasileiro SA dominate the news in Brazil these days. A market star just a few years ago, Petrobras is beset by graft scandals, has stagnant production levels and is the world’s most-indebted oil company. It is worth 40 per cent less today than it was in 2011. Ms. Foster told the senate these issues originated prior to her tenure and are being addressed.
Yet Petrobras remains the undisputed backbone of the economy in a nation where growth has slumped badly – and a hotly-contested federal election looms. Ms. Foster left this challenge unmentioned. In Brazil today, Petrobras is much more than an oil company, and that leaves Ms. Foster caught between ambition and loyalty, between the president and the people.
Graça Foster, as she likes to be called, is low profile within Brazil and almost unknown outside the country, but she is an extraordinary figure: a woman, in a still strongly chauvinist country and a markedly male-dominated industry, the first to head Petrobras and one of just a handful in the world to run an energy major. Perhaps equally remarkable for Brazil, she comes not from the moneyed elite, the traditional powerbrokers, but from poverty, from a hardscrabble favela neighbourhood.
She has spent nearly her entire career in Petrobras, as a drilling engineer, on a platform, then rising through the management ranks. And she is widely acknowledged to be a skilled administrator with an encyclopedic knowledge of every aspect of the energy business.
But if anyone is looking to Ms. Foster for bold action to boost Petrobras’s slumping fortunes, politics stands in the way.
“She is absolutely loyal,” said Francois Moreau, an oil industry veteran who has sat across from Ms. Foster at a negotiating table many times over the years. But, “in reality she is not the president, she is a lieutenant.”
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