December 15, 2020 | Joe Rowley
Brazil’s national development bank is using the COVID-19 pandemic to double down on its privatization agenda and ongoing reforms of the state-owned lender, says CEO Gustavo Montezano
Gustavo Montezano was named CEO of national development bank BNDES in June 2019 on the back of two promises: to implement an aggressive privatization agenda and shift the bank’s focus from large companies to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
“When I joined the bank in 2019, our agenda was to diversify BNDES in terms of products and services, de-leverage the equity hedge funds that we have in our portfolio, and to focus the bank on the social, environmental, and economic development of Brazil,” said Montezano during a telephone interview with LatinFinance in late November.
Eight months later, the former deputy special secretary for privatization at the Ministry of Economy faced a cri