If the scale of what is believed to have been in, recent years, the cataclysmic decline in the Venezuelan economy with all of its devastating consequences, is attributed largely to Washington’s intervention to staunch the flow of the country’s oil to international markets, it transpires, according to recent reports, that graft and corruption among oil industry officials may well have made its own hefty contribution to the decline.
Persistent reports of corruption in the country’s oil industry, on a grand scale, have increasingly featured in the news headlines emanating from Caracas and elsewhere. The issue has attracted heightened attention since March 20 this year when the man commonly referred to as the country’s ‘oil Czar,’ Tareck El Aissami ‘called time’ on his position as the ‘CEO’ of the sector. In the wake of his resignation, El Aissami reportedly “pledged to help investigate any allegations involving PDVSA,” though, given the length of time during which he presided over the crisis-ridden oil sector it would be a ‘stretch’ to accept that the powerful state functionary was not “fiddling” while the Venezuela’s oil industry ‘burnt.”
The state of affairs in the country’s oil sector is evident for all to see, a circumstance that makes it difficult for high officials in the country’s oil sector, including El Aissami, to throw up their hands in feigned innocence. It was the PDVSA, directly, that has reported served as the conduit through which much of the corruption passed, some of the ‘transactions’ reportedly manifesting themselves in unauthorized and ‘undocumented export of oil and the channeling to kickbacks to various well-placed functionaries in the system’. Word from Caracas that the now under-a-cloud El Alssiami has, according to an Associated Press report, “pledged to help investigate any allegations involving PDVSA” is probably likely to count for little in terms of providing assurances given the fact that the indiscretions occurred on his watch.
That the breadth and scale of the corruption had spread far and wide is reflected in what AP reported has been a spate of arrests that included “senior officials in the government of President Nicolás Maduro and business leaders” in a “scheme involving international oil sales”. Whatever the extent of the substantive corruption that has been ensuing in the Venezuelan oil industry, the ‘rackets’ would have been aided by the challenges to the country’s oil industry arising out of the protracted US oil embargo and what are believed to have been the underhand transactions that have been occurring to ensure that the country’s oil exports found their way around US oil sanctions and earned Venezuela (and the co-conspirators in the various rackets) returns from the transactions.
AP reported that the oversight agency (PDVSA) “allegedly signed contracts for the loading of crude on ships…without any type of administrative control or guarantees,” in violation of legal regulations. “Once the oil was marketed, the corresponding payments were not made” to the state oil company,” the AP report added. Since the disclosure of the irregularities in the administration of the country’s oil sector, and the stepping down of El Alssiami as the country’s oil ‘Czar,’ ABC News has reported that the Venezuelan official had placed himself at the “disposal of the of the leadership of the (ruling party) to support this crusade that President Nicolas Maduro has undertaken against the anti-values that we are obliged to fight, even with our lives.”
Those platitudes, however, may well now count for little in circumstances where the state’s Anti – Corruption Police have reportedly announced “an investigation into unidentified public officials in the oil industry, the justice system and some municipalities.” This is not the first time in relatively recent years that high-flying Venezuelan oil industry officials have been fingered over allegations of irregularities in the country’s oil industry. Back in 2017, a Reuters report had fingered Rafael Ramirez, a former Oil Minister and Head of PDVSA “in connection with an alleged $4.8 billion Vienna-based corruption scheme”.
Weeks before the recent crackdown, the Venezuelan authorities had given notice of a planned launch of a criminal investigations linked to a corruption purge that has resulted in the arrest of dozens of senior oil executives.
