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Bloomberg
The head of Colombia’s state oil company Ecopetrol said he doesn’t see the need for the government to sell another stake in the company — an idea the finance minister supports.
The ministry is weighing the sale of an 8.5 percent stake in Ecopetrol, worth about $3.6 billion. CEO Felipe Bayon said such a sale could take as long as two years to complete, and said the company is generating value for the government, which currently owns 88.5 percent of it.
“I don’t think there’s a need right now to do the sale,†Bayon said on Wednesday, in an interview in New York.
The government of President Ivan Duque is struggling to comply with tough fiscal deficit targets at the same time it deals with the costs of a migration crisis from neighboring Venezuela, as well as the expense of implementing programs from the 2016 peace accord with Marxist rebels. Selling part of Ecopetrol would help the government avoid cuts to public investment programs.