SÃO PAULO—The new chief executive of Brazil´s state-owned development bank, Maria Silvia Bastos Marques, said Wednesday that she plans to reorient the bank’s focus to lending to projects that will provide benefits to society.
The bank will also pay special attention to sectors that have had less access to private financing, she said without specifying which sectors. Ms. Marques was speaking at an event after replacing Chief Executive Luciano Coutinho at the helm of the bank, known as the BNDES.
A former steel executive who most recently worked on Rio de Janeiro’s Olympics preparations, Ms. Marques, 59, noted in her first news conference as head of the BNDES that Brazil´s economic and political situation is very different from what it was three or four years ago and now requires more rigorous lending policies.
Brazil’s once fast-growing economy has been losing speed for five consecutive quarters. In the first quarter of 2016, the country’s gross domestic product shrank 5.4% compared with the same period a year earlier, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics said Wednesday. The budget deficit has swollen to close to 10% of GDP.
“There are budget restrictions; resources are scarce,” Ms. Marques told reporters Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro, where the bank is based.
Ms. Marques’s stated priorities indicate a shift from the previous administration, which has been criticized in recent years for investing in large conglomerates with easy access to capital markets to create so-called national champions.
The BNDES increased its annual disbursements almost six times between 2003 and their peak in 2013. And even after a drop of 27.6% in 2015 from the previous year, the bank´s total disbursements of 135.9 billion reais last year ($37.8 billion) were still about double those of the World Bank.
Ms. Marques, who also previously held a post as a director of the BNDES, is the first woman to lead the development bank. In mid-May she was the first woman appointed by interim President Michel Temer. He named 23 men and no women to his cabinet after the suspension of President Dilma Rousseff as she faces an impeachment trial in the Senate. Ms. Rousseff is accused of violating budget laws to hide the ballooning budget deficit, an allegation she denies.
