Lula’s appointment on Wednesday, which sparked protests in several cities, means only the Supreme Court can investigate him, placing him beyond the reach of a crusading judge heading Brazil’s biggest ever graft probe into corruption at state oil company Petrobras.
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The HR department has been managed by executives linked to an oil workers union since 2003, when Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party, started his first term as president, according to Valor.
The company had to write down billions of dollars from assets like oil fields and drilling rigs after crude prices fell by more than 40%.
Brazil is facing deep uncertainty as leftist President Dilma Rousseff fights impeachment proceedings, mass protests and an explosive scandal at state oil company Petrobras. In Brazil, cabinet members can only be tried by Brazil’s supreme court.
Asked whether it wasn’t too optimistic to think that Congress would approve the proposals when it is dominated by a political crisis that is leading Rousseff’s allies to abandon her coalition, Barbosa said: “I trust our legislators can do more than one thing at a time”. A Supreme Court judge filed an injunction Friday, annulling Lula’s appointment.
The oil giant said Monday that it lost 36.9 billion reais, or $10.2 billion, in the fourth quarter.
It condemned Lula’s detention for questioning earlier this month as “violent, coercive… and baseless”, and said a pending request for his arrest is “arbitrary” and “unconstitutional”.
Police say the man, Raul Schmidt Felipe Junior, may also have acted as an intermediary between some foreign companies and Petrobras.
Petrobras’ operating results also deteriorated. Impeachment requires a two-thirds vote.
In the newspaper interview, Serra said that if Rousseff is impeached in the political trial that is starting to take shape in the lower house, Temer would have to form “a government of national union and reconstruction”, in which he would have the support of the PSDB.
As Congress holds a new session Monday, impeachment proceedings launched last week in the lower house appear to be gaining momentum: a poll released Saturday found 68% of Brazilians now favour impeaching Rousseff-up eight percentage points from February.
Millions marched in Brazil last week, calling for Rousseff’s ouster and the end of corruption.
The company is at the center of a massive corruption probe that has shaken Brazilian politics over the past two years.
The crisis has triggered angry protests laying bare sharp divisions in the country.
Brazil’s economy is expected to contract 3.5 percent this year, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists, following a 3.8 percent dive in 2015.
In that event, Rousseff would be suspended from her duties for up to 180 days.
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Rousseff’s government is also grappling with the worst recession in decades in Latin America’s largest economy and an epidemic of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, as it scrambles to host the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August.
