Lula to revoke parts of criticized sanitation decree
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Senate whip on Tuesday said the administration will revoke two decrees that changed Brazil’s sanitation framework in favor of state-owned companies.
Brazil passed a legal framework for the sanitation sector in 2020, during the previous Jair Bolsonaro administration. Experts heralded it as a way to bring competition to the field and help the country finally achieve universal sanitation coverage. At the time, all Workers’ Party lawmakers in both the House and Senate voted against the framework in a bid to favor public companies.
In April this year, President Lula signed two decrees imposing changes to the framework, tilting the scales in favor of state-owned companies. One of the measures extends the deadline for them to demonstrate their financial capacity to late 2025. Another allows them to keep servicing metropolitan areas without the need to compete in public tenders.
The following month, the House voted to strike down key provisions of the decrees by a wide majority: 295-136. The Senate was ready to follow through with the repeal, but the government decided to revoke the decrees entirely and issue new ones to prevent another political defeat.
“The government understood the message of the House and the Senate and I believe that we reached a common denominator,” government whip Jaques Wagner said on the Senate floor. The administration will revoke both texts “and publish two new decrees, removing from them all the texts considered offensive,” he added.
Mr. Wagner said the new decrees will be published on Thursday at the latest.
The Senate’s opposition whip, Rogério Marinho, argued that the Lula decrees violated “the spirit of the law” by granting state-owned companies extra time to keep servicing cities without competing in public tenders. Back in April, he told The Brazilian Report that the decrees went against the legal security provided by the sanitation framework.
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