Felipe Bayón, president of Ecopetrol, will leave office on March 31

Bogota, 26 Jan. The president of the Colombian state oil company Ecopetrol, engineer Felipe Bayón, will leave office on March 31, the company, the largest in the country, announced Thursday, without explaining the reasons.

Bayón has been at the helm of Ecopetrol since September 2017 and on October 28 he was confirmed in office by the company’s new board of directors, elected two months after the arrival of Gustavo Petro to the Presidency, who has questioned the continuity of crude oil exploration and exploitation activities in the country.

“During his tenure, the company achieved excellent operating and financial results that provided significant benefits in terms of energy sovereignty and more resources to close the social gaps in the country, always keeping people’s lives as a principle,” Ecopetrol said in a statement. release.

The company highlighted that Bayón led the transformation “to turn Ecopetrol into a diversified energy group of reference in the American continent, committed to the energy transition, with a robust long-term strategy for 2040 ‘Energy that transforms’, which fully responds to current environmental, social and governance challenges to continue growing in a sustained and profitable manner”.

“Under the leadership of Felipe Bayón, the Ecopetrol Group also became a pioneer in the region by setting a goal of reducing net carbon emissions to zero by 2050, as well as the design and implementation of its strategic plan for the development of low-emission hydrogen,” the statement added, citing its greatest achievements.

With Bayón at the helm, Ecopetrol achieved the best financial results in its history in recent years, despite the difficult international situation due to the pandemic and the drop in international crude oil prices.

On January 18, in an interview with EFE at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland), Bayón highlighted the company’s long-term vision to guarantee Colombia’s energy sovereignty.

“We also think in terms of energy sovereignty, because we see energy from the point of view of energy security, that we can produce our energy locally and depend less on external markets,” he said in the interview.

The announcement of Bayón’s departure, published after the markets closed, took the country by surprise and was lamented by various sectors.

“The departure of Felipe Bayón, president of Ecopetrol, is more than serious. His knowledge of the sector, his seriousness, his commitment and his achievements, contrast with the irresponsibility, lack of technical rigor and populism of the Minister (of Mines and Energy) Irene Vélez “, the former right-wing presidential candidate Federico Gutiérrez said on Twitter.

For his part, former Defense Minister and former ambassador to Washington Juan Carlos Pinzón defined Bayón’s departure as “a bad message” because he is a “serious man, an expert in the industry, with international experience. Not political, nor related to a private sector”. EFE

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