The financial knot of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), with a total debt of more than 100,000 million dollars, also involves the non-payment of more than 8,820 million dollars to contractors and suppliers, a burden derived from the delay in payments for up to six months to a thousand companies in the States of Campeche and Tabasco. The oil companies, on the verge of bankruptcy, have demanded a response from the parastatal for months. Finally, this week, the director of Pemex, Octavio Romero Oropeza, has met with some of them and has promised that the key of resources to settle these debts will be opened further. If in April Pemex disbursed 50,000 million pesos (3,000 million dollars), the last week of May it will disburse 70,000 million pesos (about 4,100 million dollars).
According to Pemex managers, in the first quarter of the year, just over $6 billion was allocated to paying suppliers. The disbursement has not been enough to reduce the gap in debts that still remain in more than 8.8 billion dollars, about 148 billion pesos, of outstanding balances to be covered for the diaspora of companies that provide drilling and extraction services for the parastatal. An increase of 59% compared to the 88,791 million pesos registered in the same month last year.
“Pemex’s business is not about riding contractors’ money, but about meeting its goals, and these are only achieved if commitments are met.” Those were the words of Romero Oropeza to some suppliers eager to start billing, according to these same sources. The managers have promised similar payments of 70,000 million pesos also for June, July and August, in order to close the debt gap for their network of companies. Despite the promise of payments, skepticism surrounds business owners who still do not know who they will pay and how much each contractor will be paid.
One of the sources close to these meetings explained that Pemex’s justification for the delay was due to the little room for maneuver that the Ministry of Finance had last year to support the oil company in this area, due to the subsidies that the Government ordered to apply to gasoline prices. In 2022 alone, the fuel stimuli cost the treasury about 396,000 million pesos and in 2023 these subsidies represented a gap of 195,500 million pesos. This year, on the contrary, the gasoline incentives have almost completely disappeared, resources that contractors hope will be redirected to debts.
The contractors’ red light is concentrated in the southeast of Mexico, on the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, in the States of Tabasco and Veracruz. Luis Miguel Labardini, an expert in energy issues, says that the non-payment to these companies is due, in part, to poor administration within the oil company. “The federal government has shown great support for Pemex through transfers of more than 900,000 million pesos, unfortunately these same 900,000 million pesos are the sum of Pemex Refinación’s losses in the last five years,” he mentions.
The specialist says that although the López Obrador Government has focused its strategy on reviving the battered parastatal, the payment of bank debt has been prioritized and contractors have been left in the background. Only during the last three months of 2023 and January 2024, the fiscal stimuli granted to Pemex amounted to 112,000 million pesos, according to figures from the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP).
Pemex’s debt coincides with its operational debacle. The state oil company produced 1.47 million barrels of crude oil per day in April, its worst level in 45 years, according to figures from the National Hydrocarbons Commission. The data represents a drop of 6% compared to the same period last year, when 1.5 million barrels of hydrocarbons were extracted.
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