The Extraordinary General Shareholders’ Meeting of Ecopetrol approved this Tuesday the changes in its board of directors that the Government of Abelardo De La Espriella requested last August 28. Since the State controls 88.5% of the shares of Colombia’s largest company, the result mirrors the already known list. The new board retains Luis Felipe Henao Cardona, now as president of the body, Ricardo Rodríguez Yee, and César Loza, while adding Carlos Suárez, José Camilo Manzur, Jorge Alberto Jaller, Ludmila del Carmen Vergara, Betzy Patricia Martínez, and Claudia Margarita Lafaurie. The newspaper El Tiempo highlights that only 72 shareholders attended the meeting, held at the company’s headquarters in Bogotá, whereas more than 2,000 attended the ordinary assembly last March. The Government spokesperson was Carlos Alberto Castellanos, Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance.
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The session was marked by an abrupt departure. One day earlier, Juan Carlos Hurtado resigned from the oil company, a position he held as interim since Ricardo Roa left amid criminal charges. The decision came after El Tiempo revealed a 43-minute audio in which Hurtado allegedly speaks with Catalan businessman Manel Grau — close to former president Gustavo Petro and former first lady Verónica Alcocer — and with a contractor identified as Víctor. Local media report that the audios mention alleged efforts to secure appointments to high positions at Ecopetrol, multimillion-dollar contracts, and business in Venezuela. The board president, Luis Felipe Henao, requested his irrevocable resignation. Temporarily, Camilo Barco, the company’s financial vice president, replaces him.
With the new Board already elected, the next chapter is the election of the permanent president. Market sources told EL PAÍS that the decision would come next week. The formal procedure requires the board to conduct a selection process — for which it may hire an external recruiting firm. In practice, however, the trend has been for the board to appoint the Government’s favorite. In this case, that position is held by Joaquín Gutiérrez Caballero, from Santa Marta, businessman, and personal friend of over two decades of President Abelardo De La Espriella.
The president has already presented him, who also managed his campaign before the Unión Sindical Obrera, the main union of the oil company, as one of the strongest candidates. Critics point out that Gutiérrez has no prior experience in the hydrocarbons sector, although not all Ecopetrol presidents had previous experience in the sector. The appointment, in any case, must follow the statutes: convene a Board meeting and submit it to a vote.
The change comes at a time when the market was already closely watching every move of the company that has come to produce more than 11% of all the nation’s revenues. Three weeks ago, investment bank BTG Pactual rated the slate proposed by the Government as relatively weak in operational hydrocarbons experience and capital allocation, warning that a president outside the sector would require greater corporate governance weight to compensate.
The company, listed on the Colombia and New York stock exchanges, faces the challenge of showing investors that the new leadership can separate politics from management, just as it faces a sustained decline in profits, lower exploratory activity in Colombia, and an ongoing forensic audit over alleged administrative irregularities. The short-term lifeline has been the rise in crude prices, derived from the blockade in Hormuz.
