Consistent with the widely held view that relatively poor countries that find themselves sitting, often unexpectedly, on significant volumes of oil almost often slide into a condition of graft and corruption, the Venezuelan government would now appear to have officially embraced that truism, its National Assembly recently moving to unanimously approve a piece of legislation known as the Asset Forfeiture Act (AFA), which allows the authorities to confiscate assets obtained by corruption and use them to finance social programmes infrastructure and public services. The speed with which the piece of legislation appeared to have been hurried through the country’s National Assembly is thought to have been triggered, by irrefutable evidence of widespread corruption in the transaction of oil-related business deals, many of which were believed to have been perpetrated at the height of the crippling United States embargo on Venezuela’s oil exports that devastated the country’s economy.
