At Venezuela's PDVSA, Only Arrests -- Not Oil Production -- Rise Production keeps on dropping, arrests however are going up By Carlos Camacho Latin American Herald Tribune March 21, 2018
CARACAS -- A widespread corruption probe has done nothing to stop production from dropping at state oil Company PDVSA.
Wednesday morning, the Attorney General designated by the illegitimate Constituent Assembly, Tareck William Saab, said Jesus Luongo, the general manager of PDVSA’s CRP, one of the world’s largest oil refineries, was in custody, accused of selling fuels to a private company at a discount and buying them back at a steeply marked-up price.
Analysts debate how earnest Maduro really is in pursuing corruption inside his main cash cow (oil accounts for more than 90% of all of Venezuela’s hard currency income), but what is not debatable is that PDVSA produces fewer barrels every day.
The company now produces 1.5 million oil barrels a day, down from the 3.5 million b/d it produced in 1999, when the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, first took over.
And while the government of Nicolas Maduro has arrested 80 former PDVSA officials, contractors and businessmen in connection with instances of corruption inside the company, critics say it was actually changes implemented by Chavez and his successor that made widespread graft possible inside the once mighty oil company.
The most powerful man in Venezuelan oil history, the first official ever to hold simultaneously the posts of oil minister and head of the state oil company for more than a decade, Rafael Ramirez (oil minister 2002-2014, PDVSA head 2004-2014), is on the lam, a wanted man in Venezuela by the government of Maduro, his partner in the cabinet of ministers for several years but who fired him one year after becoming President.
Ramirez’s successor, Eulogio Del Pino, is in jail, as is the man who replaced them both, Nelson Martinez.
That’s three PDVSA presidents in a row that are either in jail or wanted. But Transparencia Venezuela, the local chapter of Transparency International, said it was Chavez’s way of doing things which allowed PDVSA to become so corrupt.
In a report published in December 2017, when a probe in PDVSA was just starting, Transparencia wrote in a report “many of us wonder if we will really get to the bottom of this or if this is just an attack between chavista factions in power”.
“The crisis now storming PDVSA has its origins in the policies started by the chavista regime some 15 years ago,” the report says, adding “the chavista government bestowed on one person -– Rafael Ramirez -- the presidency of PDVSA and the Ministry of Oil. That way it created a formula that liquidated transparency and impeded correct auditing of the state oil company’s performance.”
And as OPEC, rampant investigations and the headlines demonstrate, corruption and a decline in oil production have been the main results of that policy.
|