Nicolás Maduro targets the decrepit state oil giant
So far the probe has led to the resignation of Tareck El Aissami, the oil minister, who has not been named in the investigation. Nearly two dozen people have been arrested, including politicians and the cryptocurrency regulator. Eleven other people are being sought by the state prosecutor.
These losses for the enfeebled company are grave. They came about partly because the firm became more reckless in order to evade American sanctions, which were imposed onhas been selling oil at a heavy discount through a byzantine network of intermediaries, mostly to independent refiners in China. The middlemen bypass American sanctions, sometimes deploying so-called ghost ships which switch off their tracking devices or change their names at sea.
But the government had not said anything publicly about the brewing scandal until March, when it confirmed the first arrests had been made. One theory for the delay is that Mr Maduro felt he needed an explanation for a deteriorating economy. Amid a shortage of dollars, the central bank has been struggling to prop up the local currency, the bolívar. It has slumped sharply since October, falling by two-thirds against the dollar.
Francisco Monaldi of Rice University in Houston, Texas, doubts that Mr Maduro is being particularly strategic. Instead, what the probe hints at is something simpler and sadder: that the country’s oil industry is “a massive corruption machine in which very little money at all ends up benefiting the Venezuelan people”.
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