Ecopetrol : A coup d coup story of musical chairs
Gustavo Petro built his presidency on a promise to wean Colombia off hydrocarbons, banning new coal, gas, and oil exploration contracts the moment he took office, folding the whole program into something his government calls the Just Energy Transition. In April 2023 he installed Ricardo Roa, the man who had managed his own 2022 campaign, as president of Ecopetrol, the state oil company that generates roughly a third of Colombia’s fiscal revenue and forty percent of its exports. Two years later Roa stood on an earnings call and told investors exploration is what gives an oil company long term stability, that Ecopetrol has not stopped signing new search contracts, and that he hoped the debate over the ban would continue. The president’s own handpicked loyalist became the loudest institutional voice against the president’s own signature energy policy, and neither man has backed down since.
That contradiction alone would carry an issue. Colombia gave this newsletter a second one for free. Roa is currently facing criminal charges for violating campaign spending limits during the same 2022 campaign he ran, plus a separate influence peddling indictment tied to a liquefied natural gas contract at Ecopetrol subsidiary Hocol, plus scrutiny over a luxury apartment purchase, plus a surveillance scandal in which the company paid an American law firm to analyze the private data of seventy employees, including his own. On April 7 2026, Ecopetrol’s board finally forced him out, not through resignation, but through a procedural maneuver, assigning him early vacation followed by unpaid leave running until after Colombia’s presidential election. Petro is still defending him publicly. The stock, in the meantime, went up.
THE NUMBERS, WHERE PETRO’S OWN POLICY COLLIDED WITH THE BALANCE SHEET
Ecopetrol closed 2025 with EBITDA of forty six point seven trillion pesos, a thirty nine percent margin, and net income of nine trillion pesos, down thirty nine point five percent from fourteen point nine trillion the year before. The decline traces directly to a Brent price that fell nearly fifteen percent across the year, a macro headwind no amount of internal efficiency could fully offset. What the efficiency program did offset was significant. Reserve replacement reached a hundred twenty one percent, the highest level in four years, meaning Ecopetrol added more proven reserves than it produced, an unusual accomplishment for a company operating inside a country whose own president has spent three years actively discouraging new exploration. The company beat its 2025 drilling target by sixty percent, completing sixteen wells against plan, and posted a three year exploration success rate forty four percent above the industry average. Average daily production held at seven hundred forty five thousand barrels, transportation volumes surpassed one point one million barrels a day, and refining throughput reached four hundred seventeen thousand barrels daily. The company’s crude differential against Brent improved to four dollars sixty cents a barrel, the best result in four years, driven by market diversification and trading desk coordination out of Houston and Singapore. Total contribution to the Colombian state, dividends, taxes, and royalties combined, came to thirty four point six trillion pesos for the year, on top of eight point eight trillion pesos in dividends paid mid year alone, a ten percent yield.
None of these numbers describe a company being managed toward extinction. They describe a company that spent 2025 doing the opposite of what its own president’s public rhetoric would predict, expanding its reserve base, beating its own drilling targets, and improving its trading economics, while paying the Colombian treasury more than a third of its entire EBITDA in the same year Petro’s Just Energy Transition supposedly aimed to shrink the company’s relevance to the national budget.
THE PERMIAN QUESTION PETRO WANTS ANSWERED THE OPPOSITE WAY
Here the contradiction sharpens into something closer to absurdity. A meaningful share of Ecopetrol’s 2025 production growth came from Permian Basin assets in the United States, alongside Colombia’s own Caño Sur field and a forty five percent stake acquired in block CPO 09. Petro, in the middle of the Roa corruption crisis, publicly called on Ecopetrol to sell its American fracking operations entirely, redirecting the proceeds into clean energy generation, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and submarine fiber optic cable, framing hydrocarbons as inconvenient everywhere in the world regardless of where they are extracted.
The demand arrives at the exact moment the Permian position is helping carry the company’s production numbers through a year Colombian output alone could not have sustained on its own. Selling the American shale assets Petro wants gone would remove one of the few genuine growth levers Ecopetrol has left inside a domestic policy environment explicitly designed to prevent new growth from Colombian soil. The president who will not let Ecopetrol drill new exploration wells at home is simultaneously demanding the company abandon the wells abroad that have been quietly compensating for that restriction. Colombia’s Senate already passed a permanent fracking ban in April 2025 under Petro’s own Pacto Historico coalition, a bill still awaiting House confirmation, meaning the domestic door and the foreign door could both close within the same political term if Petro gets everything he has publicly asked for.
ROA, THE MAN WHO BROKE FROM THE MANDATE THAT MADE HIM
Roa’s break from Petro’s own exploration ban was not a quiet policy disagreement handled in private. It happened in public, on an earnings call, from the man Petro had personally installed specifically because of his loyalty. The irony compounds from there. Colombia’s National Electoral Council found Roa responsible for exceeding legal campaign spending limits by more than five point three billion pesos while running Petro’s second round campaign in 2022, an unprecedented ruling against a sitting state company president. Prosecutors separately charged him with influence peddling, alleging he pressured Hocol’s then president to steer a Chuchupa Ballena LNG regasification contract toward a company tied to a specific businessman ally. A parallel investigation into how Roa purchased a luxury Bogota apartment led to a formal accusation of trafficking in influence over that transaction as well, with a trial now scheduled. Underneath all of it sits the surveillance scandal, a five million dollar contract with Covington and Burling to analyze data from seventy employees, ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, that both Ecopetrol’s own compliance leadership and Petro himself have since distanced themselves from.
Petro’s response to all of this has been full throated defense rather than distance. He has accused business groups aligned with former president Alvaro Uribe of orchestrating the entire campaign against Roa specifically to seize control of twenty trillion pesos in oil and gas contracts set to expire within a month of the accusations peaking, framing the corruption case as a corporate takeover attempt dressed up as a legal process. He has pointed to Ecopetrol’s rising share price as proof the market does not believe the crisis is real, attributing the rally instead to international oil prices and stable domestic production. He has publicly recounted a February 2026 meeting with Donald Trump, describing what he called a trap embedded in an official White House photograph, while insisting he has never heard a single hostile word from anyone in the American government about Ecopetrol specifically. None of this reads like a president preparing to let his own appointee go quietly. It reads like a president who understands that Roa’s fall implicates his own campaign’s financing at the exact moment Colombia heads into a presidential election.
THE POLITICS OF A COMPANY CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO ELECTIONS
Ecopetrol’s board scheduled Roa’s forced leave to run specifically until after Colombia’s presidential election, an unmistakable signal that the company’s own governance has become inseparable from the country’s electoral calendar. The Union Sindical Obrera, representing a meaningful share of Ecopetrol’s eighty seven thousand employees and contractors, has demanded Roa’s outright resignation and threatened mobilization affecting roughly twenty five thousand workers if the board fails to act, pressure that ultimately contributed to the April removal even as Petro’s allies on the board tried to hold the line. Minority shareholders, exposed to Ecopetrol’s dual listing on the Colombian exchange and the New York Stock Exchange, wrote directly to Petro and the board warning that Roa’s continued leadership was actively devaluing the shares regardless of the presumption of innocence Petro kept invoking on his behalf.
The deeper political fight is about who gets to decide what a state oil company is for. Petro has argued explicitly that hydrocarbons are inconvenient everywhere in the world and that every barrel extracted only accelerates a well’s own exhaustion, a philosophical position most Colombian oil executives, including his own appointee, do not share. Roa has argued the opposite, that exploration is the only mechanism that gives a hydrocarbon company long term stability, and that Colombia’s fiscal dependence on hydrocarbon revenue, more than twenty percent of public revenue and more than half of exports according to independent estimates, cannot responsibly be unwound overnight regardless of the ideological commitment behind the effort. Both men are describing the same company. Neither is wrong about the numbers they are citing. They are simply optimizing for different clocks, Petro for a multi decade energy transition he may not be in office to see through, Roa for a company that has to report quarterly results to shareholders in two countries regardless of which transition timeline eventually wins.
WHAT THE TAPE IS SAYING NOW
Petro’s own defense of Roa leaned on the fact that Ecopetrol’s shares rose even as the corruption scandal peaked, crediting rising international oil prices and stable domestic production. He is not wrong about the mechanism, only about what it proves. Brent’s climb during the 2026 Iran war lifted every producer’s revenue regardless of that producer’s internal governance quality, the same tide that carried Aramco, Petrobras, and Pemex through their own respective crises earlier in this newsletter’s coverage. China exports deflation into whatever industry it decides to scale, and oil prices during a supply shock export the opposite, a rising tide that flatters management teams and corrupt ones in exactly the same proportion, for exactly as long as the shock lasts. A share price rally driven by a war seven thousand miles away says nothing about whether Ecopetrol’s own governance crisis has actually been resolved, and everything about how easily external tailwinds can be mistaken for internal vindication.
STRESS TEST
Governance risk is the whole story here, not a footnote to it. A state company with three separate criminal proceedings circling its chief executive, a board split between operational stability and reputational risk, and a workforce publicly threatening mobilization, is not a company operating with a clear hand at the wheel, regardless of how strong the underlying production numbers look on paper.
Policy whiplash risk sits directly beneath the governance risk. Colombia’s presidential election could install a government that either accelerates the exploration ban Roa has been quietly ignoring or abandons it entirely, and Ecopetrol’s own five year capital plan cannot be built with confidence until that outcome is known, a timing problem no efficiency program can engineer around.
The Permian question remains unresolved and consequential either way. Selling the American shale assets Petro wants gone would remove a genuine growth lever precisely when domestic exploration remains politically constrained. Keeping them defies the president’s own stated energy philosophy indefinitely, a contradiction the company has so far managed by simply not choosing, an option that will not remain available forever.
THE INSTITUTIONAL LABEL
Ecopetrol defies. Installed with a mandate to help shrink Colombia’s hydrocarbon dependence, run by a man who spent his tenure arguing the opposite in public, propped up through a corruption crisis by a war on the other side of the planet, and still generating more cash for the Colombian treasury than almost any policy debate in Bogota seems willing to acknowledge. The company was built to be an instrument of the president’s own energy transition. Instead it became the loudest institutional argument against it, run by the one man who owed Petro everything and used that position to say no anyway.
SOURCES
Ecopetrol fourth quarter and full year 2025 results, SEC Form 6-K filings, and PRNewswire coverage, first through fourth quarter 2025. IndexBox, Ecopetrol 2025 financial results summary, March 2026. Portafolio, El Colombiano, Infobae, RTVC Noticias, and ColombiaOne, coverage of the Ricardo Roa corruption case and board removal, February through April 2026. Bloomberg, Ecopetrol CEO charges reporting, February 9 2026. S&P Global Commodity Insights, Roa’s public break from Petro’s exploration ban, May 2023. Latin America Reports, Ecopetrol surveillance scandal and Petro’s call to sell US fracking assets, June 2025.
