(Reuters) – President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took advantage of a speech during a Portugal-Brazil business forum in the Portuguese city of Matosinhos to once again criticize Brazil’s current benchmark interest rate and said it makes borrowing unfeasible.
“We have a problem in Brazil, Prime Minister, that I don’t know if Portugal has, is that our interest rate is very high, it’s very high. In Brazil, the Selic rate, which is the reference rate, is 13.75%. Nobody borrows money at 13.75%. Nobody”, said the president, referring to the Prime Minister of Portugal, António Costa, who also participated in the event.
Lula, his allies and members of his government have publicly and frequently criticized the monetary policy of the Central Bank and the president of the autarchy, Roberto Campos Neto, appointed to the position by the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, and who has a term in office until the end of next year.
In his speech to an audience of businessmen, Lula again said that his government will not carry out privatizations and criticized the sales of public companies carried out in recent years.
“In Brazil, we are not going to sell public companies. What we want is to invite entrepreneurs to partner with us in what we need to create again”, he said.
“We disposed of our assets, our assets became smaller and the quality of service did not improve”, added Lula, who mainly attacked the privatization of Eletrobras.
“We privatized our biggest electricity company, which was Eletrobras… When that company was sold, the first thing the board did was increase the board’s salary from 60,000 reais a month to 360,000 reais a month. If you want to see only nonsense, I now have to appoint a director for this company. A director of this company to work once a month earns 200 thousand reais”, he said.
(By Eduardo Simões and Gabriel Araújo, in São Paulo)
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