National Petroleum Agency Establishes New Rules for Foreign Trade

Resolution Aims to Minimize Barriers to Investment, Reduce Regulatory Costs, Improve Regulatory Quality, and Promote Free Competition, Ensuring Societal Interests.

The Resolution ANP No. 777/2019 published yesterday, April 8, by the National Agency of Petroleum, aims to regulate the foreign trade of biofuels, oil and oil derivatives, and natural gas, replacing the 25 normative acts that regulated the subject. The new resolution establishes a new regulatory framework for the sector, standardizing the authorization requirements for the activity and the administrative handling of import and export license requests.

The new Resolution ANP was created with strategic objectives to update the regulation in order to minimize barriers to investment and reduce regulatory costs, improving regulatory quality through administrative simplification and promoting free competition, with the premise of ensuring societal interests.

In addition to the benefits of simplifying procedures in a single resolution, the resolution ANP No. 777/2019 came to eliminate bureaucracies and enable distributors to directly import products congruent with the activity for which they are authorized, such as the creation, by the distributors themselves, of companies solely to carry out their imports.

The new resolution is not only here to reduce bureaucracy but also to expand the ANP’s capacity for control and oversight, standardizing the set of information required to grant licenses in the Integrated Foreign Trade System (Siscomex) and to enhance the Agency’s capacity to combat fuel adulteration by making end consumers of methanol, who directly import the product, regulated agents.

See the full Resolution ANP No. 777/2019 in the Official Gazette of the Union.

According to data presented by Petrobras, from 2015 to 2018, resulting from the divestment policy adopted by the company, approximately US$ 15.4 billion has already entered Petrobras’s coffers.