Graça Foster will be new president of Petrobras

Petrobras, Brazil’s giant, state-run oil company, the sixth most profitable company in the world in 2009 and one of the fifty biggest, is going to have a new president. And for the first time, the president will be a woman. Maria das Graças Silva Foster, presently the director of Gás and Energy at Petrobrás, will take over from José Sergio Gabrielli at the beginning of February, according to a note released yesterday by the corporation. With the announcement of her appointment, Petrobras stock rose over 3.5%.

Graça Foster, 58, is married and has two children. She has degrees in chemical and nuclear engineering (public universities in Rio de Janeiro), as well as an MBA (Getulio Vargas), and is a career employee at Petrobras (she started as an intern in 1978). She has a powerful sponsor and ally (“conta com a confiança e o apoio”): president Dilma Rousseff – they have known each other since 1998. At that time, Dilma was state Secretary of Energy in Rio Grande do Sul and Graça Foster worked in a Petrobras subsidiary on the Brazil-Bolivia gas pipeline. They worked closely together between 2003 and 2005, when Graça Foster was the secretary of Petroleum and Gas at the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and Dilma Rousseff was the minister. At the end of last year, Graça Foster was one of the few aides who accompanied president Rousseff at meetings in Brussels with European officials on political and economic issues.

Although Graça Foster was born in Minas Gerais, she grew up in a Rio de Janeiro slum (“favela”) and started working at the age of eight as a trash picker, collecting used newspapers, cardboard, bottles and tin cans that she sold to buy school supplies.

Graça Foster’s appointment is considered much more “technical” than political [just last week, Dilma substituted Aloizio Mercandante (who is the new minister of Education) at Science and Technology with another “technical” appointment: the mathematician Marco Antonio Raupp].

Gabrielli, 62, has headed Petrobrás since 2005 (he is the longest serving president of the corporation), after being the director of Finances and Investor Relations. He is from Bahia, where he studied economics and is a professor at the Federal University (he also has a Ph.D. from the University of Boston and studied at the London School of Economics). He is a member of the PT in Bahia and is expected to occupy a position in the administration of the governor of Bahia, Jacques Wagner.

The Graça Foster appointment will become official at a meeting of the Petrobras board on February 9.