(Bloomberg) — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that the replacement of 10 executives at the Petroleos Mexicanos arm that sets and monitors prices was an effort to end decades-long questionable practices.
“There was an instruction to clean Pemex International,” AMLO, as the leftist president is known, said at his morning news conference on Thursday. “Some people had been there for almost 30 years. It was converted into a limited partnership.”
AMLO said that the people who were in charge of PMI had been buying and selling a million barrels of oil a day and distanced themselves from government supervision using as excuses their own technical expertise. He repeated the frequent promise that his government isn’t going to tolerate corruption.
Pemex in a shakeup on Friday announced that it had replaced the head of PMI and the head of crude trading, among other new appointments. The moves followed a clash between the former PMI management and Pemex’s new leadership team headed by Chief Executive Officer Octavio Romero over new formulas created to price oil sales to refiners in the U.S. and elsewhere, according to people familiar with the matter.
Romero, a longtime Lopez Obrador ally, had called for an external review because he had questions about the marketing of Mexico’s crude, while the head of trading opposed his decision to launch an external review of the formula.
To contact the reporters on this story: Eric Martin in Mexico City at [email protected];Cyntia Barrera Diaz in Mexico City at [email protected]
