Weekly Report -18 January 2005

If industry and foreign trade minister Luiz Fernando Furlan had been a card-carrying member of the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), by now he would probably have lost his job. Last week he came out with criticism of government policies that would not have been tolerated from party members; he took on Lula's priority attention to Mercosur and the rest of South America and the tolerance of the Real's appreciation against the US dollar. But then, Furlan is a businessman who describes himself as 'a spokesman for the productive sector'.