Changing the TCU rule prevents auctioning of pre-salted areas this year



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The government will no longer be able to auction the pre-salt oil surplus this year, which could bring the public coffers up to R $ 100 billion. Without a call for tenders, scheduled for November 29, Petrobras will no longer receive payment for the revision of the terms of the contract that deals with these areas, called expensive badignment.

Petrobras entered into the expensive divestment agreement with the union and allowed the state company to explore 5 billion barrels of oil in the pre-salt fields without bidding. In return, the company paid 74.8 billion reais to the government. In the following years, however, oil prices fell sharply, driven by geopolitical tensions and worries about economic performance, among other factors. As a result, Petrobras claims to have paid the Union a very high value in the 2010 agreement and claiming compensation.

The reason for the postponement of the auction is a modification of the criteria for control of the transfer of the Court of Accounts of the Union (TCU), approved last week. The Court of Accounts now requires that the public authority send an extract containing all the information relating to any offer, at least 150 days before the date of publication of the offer. This forces the government to send all the data six months before the day of the conflict. By this new criterion, the government has already missed the deadline.

According to the old rule, destabilizations were evaluated in five different stages, which allowed the government to deliver the documents at the same time as it organized the dispute. The 15th round of oil and gas, which took place on March 29, had to be changed the day before, when the TCU withdrew two zones of the round.

The new rule of the TCU came into force on the 25th of June, when it was published in the Official Journal of the Union.If you sent the extract with the information of the the call for tenders this Thursday, June 28, the Union could not publish the announcement of the auction on November 26th. Between the publication of the announcement and the auction, the standard interval followed by the government is 45 days. If all happened without delay, the call for bids could only take place on January 9th.

Criteria. However, the Broadcasting Corporation found that the government does not have this information and that it is not close to complete the necessary data collection. The data includes the description of the object to be privatized, the expected value of the investments and the auction schedule.

Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME), Marcio Felix, said that TCU was engaged in discussions on the expensive badignment and said the government will dialogue in search of the best solution . Petrobras did not answer. The TCU reported that new cases will follow the rule approved last week, and those that are already underway will continue to follow the old instruction.

The organization was specifically asked if the rule was already valid for the surplus auction of the onerous badignment. It only indicated that, during the transition period between the standards, it could proceed to case-by-case badessments. The report concluded, however, that the government could only hold the award in 2018 if the new rule was repealed.

Without the auction, the government will not be able to pay Petrobras this year either. The union relied on this collection to pay the company

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