Ecopetrol Purge Reaches the Subsidiaries as Colombia’s Oil Giant Heads for a Full Board Vote

COLOMBIA · ENERGY

Six weeks after the board changed hands, the broom is still moving through Ecopetrol’s executive floors. The new government calls it depoliticization. The departing names tell the story.

Ecopetrol’s Barrancabermeja refinery on the Magdalena river, with the Cristo Petrolero monument. The state oil giant is replacing most of its executive layer. (Photo: Yesid Ferney Patiño, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Ecopetrol purge is no longer a plan — it is a personnel ledger. Since the end of July, Colombia’s state-controlled oil company has lost its chief executive, five vice presidents and at least two further top executives, almost all of them appointees of the Gustavo Petro years, and this week the turnover reached into the subsidiaries: gas retailer Essentia confirmed that Carlos González is out and Juan Carlos Álvarez takes over as acting president, Valora Analitik reported.

It is the first visible purge inside the company since the board of directors changed hands under President Abelardo de la Espriella’s government — and it is not finished. On Monday, 15 September, an extraordinary shareholders assembly convenes at 11:00 a.m. at Ecopetrol’s Bogotá headquarters to elect all nine members of the board for the remainder of the 2025–2029 term, and to vote on a statutory reform of how the board is renewed.

Who Has Left So Far

The cascade began at the top. Ricardo Roa Barragán, the Petro-appointed CEO whose tenure was marked by scandal coverage, formally ended his presidency on 30 July. Juan Carlos Hurtado Parra, the company’s upstream vice president, has served as acting president since 31 July while an executive search firm hunts for a permanent successor.

In late August, the new board — chaired since early August by Luis Felipe Henao, an independent member backed by the new government — authorized five senior-management changes effective from September. La República named the departing vice presidents: Sandra Lucía Rodríguez Rojas (territorial transformation and HSE), Jaime Andrés García Cuello (administrative and services), Julián Fernando Lemos Valero (strategy and new business) and Felipe Trujillo López (refining and industrial processes), along with the head of institutional relations. Days later, as The Rio Times reported on 1 September, the science, technology and innovation vice presidency under Sergio Andrés Moreno Acevedo and the executive vice presidency for transition energies followed, both filled by internal acting appointees.

The pattern is consistent: Petro-era hires out, interim insiders in, permanent decisions deferred until after the new board is elected. On the board itself, the Petro-aligned members Ángela María Robledo and Tatiana Roa resigned in July; Infobae has reported that directors Alberto Merlano, Hildebrando Vélez and Carolina Arias could follow when shareholders vote on Monday.

The ‘No Ideology’ Doctrine

Henao has been unusually explicit about the philosophy behind the sweep. “We have to remove the idea that Ecopetrol should be governed by ideology,” he told Caracol on 25 August. “An oil company has to produce oil. You cannot put it to producing bread or cars.”

His first decisions went beyond personnel. On 9 August, Pulzo reported, Henao ordered a protocol to freeze internal evidence — documents and institutional chat logs — ahead of a forensic audit of the company’s recent governance. “So that they don’t destroy documents on us, being able to freeze all the institutional chats that have taken place,” he said. The audit framing signals that the Ecopetrol purge is meant to produce a paper trail, not just new business cards.

What Ecopetrol does. Ecopetrol S.A. operates as an integrated energy company. It operates through four segments: Exploration and Production; Transport and Logistics; Refining and Petrochemicals; and Energy transmission and Toll Roads Concessions. The Exploration and Production segment engages in the exploration and production of oil and gas. The Transport and Logistics segment is involved in…

A Profitable Patient

The company being restructured is not in crisis — which is precisely the new board’s argument. Ecopetrol posted second-quarter revenue of 40.2 trillion pesos (about US$12.8 billion), EBITDA of 17.7 trillion pesos (about US$5.6 billion), up 59 percent year on year at a 44 percent margin, and net profit of 6.1 trillion pesos (about US$1.9 billion), up 235 percent. Peso figures are converted at roughly 3,145 pesos per dollar, the rate Reuters used on 10 September.

Beneath the headline numbers, gas sales fell 23 percent on lower contracted volumes from the Cusiana and Cupiagua fields — the supply crunch The Rio Times has tracked in Colombia’s run-up to the board vote. Henao’s case is that operational focus, not political programming, closes that gap.

What Monday Decides

The state holds 88.49 percent of Ecopetrol’s shares, so Monday’s assembly is, in practice, the government’s decision. The electoral quotient system reserves space for minority shareholders, but the majority slate will carry. Once the nine-member board is seated, the interim structure — acting CEO, acting vice presidents — can be converted into permanent appointments.

Three questions hang over the vote. First, whether the new board keeps Henao and fellow independent Ricardo Rodríguez Yee, the two members the government publicly wants to retain. Second, whether the permanent CEO search produces an oil-industry name or a political one — the market will read that appointment as the true test of the “no ideology” doctrine. And third, whether the forensic audit produces findings that outlast the news cycle.

For foreign investors, the signal so far is double-edged: a government asserting control over its largest company, and a management layer being rebuilt in public. Monday turns the interim into a structure. What that structure does with a 17.7-trillion-peso (about US$5.6 billion) EBITDA machine is the story of the next quarter.