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China, Venezuela discuss 10-year cooperation plan

CARACAS, June 29 (Xinhua) — Venezuela and China on Monday assessed progress in bilateral projects and drafted a 10-year cooperation plan as part of their comprehensive strategic partnership. The plan was drafted during the 4th technical meeting of the China-Venezuela High-Level Joint Commission that opened here on Monday. Addressing the opening session of the three-day meeting, Venezuelan Vice President for Planning Ricardo Menendez said the goal of the meeting was to agree on projects that will help spur development in both nations. "We are going to be working on the topic of telecommunications," to provide computer tablets for university and primary school students, install related factories and build undersea cables to connect with other parts, such as the Caribbean, said Menendez. Also on the agenda are plans to boost Venezuelan industry by expanding cement plants, and iron, aluminum and paper manufacturing, and by bolstering infrastructure at ports and airports. […]

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Pirates and hold-ups: crime strikes Venezuela’s oil industry

MARACAIBO, Venezuela When night falls over western Venezuela, armed gangs known as "pirates" sometimes ride boats into muggy Lake Maracaibo to steal equipment from oil wells. In the country’s Paraguana peninsula, opposite the Caribbean island of Aruba, slum dwellers at times break through a perimeter wall into Venezuela’s biggest refinery and rob machinery, construction tools, and cables to sell as scrap. On the other side of the OPEC country in Monagas state, around 26,000 potential barrels were lost in March during a shutdown after state oil company employees and contractors stole copper cables and caused a tank to overflow. Venezuela’s national crime pandemic – the United Nations says the country has the world’s second-highest murder rate after Honduras – is a growing headache for the oil industry, which accounts for nearly all of the country’s export revenues. Hold-ups and thefts in the sector are on the rise, taking a […]

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Venezuela’s Maduro Faces His Biggest Test in December 6 Vote

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Photographer: Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images Venezuela’s opposition is set to gain control of congress for the first time in 16 years in a Dec. 6 vote seen as the biggest test yet for the Socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro. Official campaigning to choose all 167 members of the National Assembly will take place from Nov. 13 to Dec. 3, the head of national electoral council Tibisay Lucena said in a televised speech Monday. Opposition candidates would get 56.2 percent of the vote, compared to 29.8 percent for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela currently in charge of the Assembly, according to the latest Datanalisis survey of 1,000 people. The May 18-30 poll had a 3 percentage-point margin of error. “We will be in a situation with an already weak president weakened further by a defeat in the election,” Barclays Plc analyst Alejandro […]

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Venezuela sets date for elections after mounting pressure

AP Photo/Fernando Llano CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela will hold legislative elections Dec. 6, election officials announced Monday after months of mounting pressure from local opposition groups and international observers. The South American country’s laws mandate that National Assembly balloting be held this year, but elections officials had delayed setting a date, raising concerns the contest would be canceled. In her announcement, elections council head Tibisay Lucena said the organization had always intended to set a date and was not reacting to public pressure. "These attacks and phony analyses from national experts and international figures have mostly been very ignorant," she said. The date is timed to commemorate the first election of the late President Hugo Chavez, who launched the country’s socialist revolution when voters chose him overwhelmingly on Dec. 6, 1998. The ruling socialist party currently holds a majority in the legislature, but polls indicate that if the […]

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Big Investors Shun Venezuela’s Flagship Oil Industry Event

Jun 19, 2015 Venezuela’s biggest annual gathering of oil investors used to be a memorable affair: thousands of oilmen from around the world would arrive, greeted by statuesque models, and attend whisky-fueled after-parties. The deal-making could run into the billions. This year’s event was a far cry from previous years’ bashes, where hordes of investors would clamor for a stake in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. “It used to be much bigger,” lamented Hugo Hernández, a former head of the Venezuela Petroleum Chamber, reminiscing about the days when 40,000 participants would show up. “You know how the situation is in the country. Now many people don’t come.” Organizers said slightly more than 3,000 people visited the expo this week, including hundreds of workers from state oil giant PDVSA. Among the notable absentees were many of Venezuela’s foreign production partners. Of the more than 30 multinationals that […]

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Refining Magnate O’Malley’s PBF Soars on Exxon-PDVSA Deal

PBF Energy Inc. surged a record 14 percent after agreeing to buy a Louisiana crude refinery jointly owned by Exxon Mobil Corp. and Venezuela’s state-controlled oil company. The transaction, valued at $322 million, will increase PBF’s refining capacity by more than one-third and marks the Parsippany, New Jersey-based company’s first foray into the Gulf Coast, the biggest U.S. crude-processing region. It “represents a significant step in the strategic growth of PBF,” Chief Executive Officer Thomas Nimbley said in a statement on Thursday. Executive Chairman Thomas O’Malley, a former oil trader, has spent the last quarter century amassing refining assets and selling them at a premium to bigger operators. Today’s purchase involves a 189,000 barrels-a-day refining and chemicals plant in the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette, as well as a patchwork of related pipelines and storage facilities. PBF climbed to $29.97 at the close in New York in the biggest […]

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Venezuela Oil Loans Go Awry for China

HONG KONG—As Venezuela’s economy totters thanks to low oil prices and years of mismanagement, a Chinese government-owned bank is badly on the hook. China Development Bank has lent nearly $37 billion to Venezuela since 2008, helping to prop up the regime of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, while becoming one of the Latin American nation’s biggest creditors. Venezuela says China has pledged billions more. CDB’s plan was simple. In return for its largess, Venezuela would send China millions of barrels of crude each year. Since the middle part of the last decade, the bank has doled out tens of billions in similar loans to energy companies and governments in other oil-producing countries to help secure resources for China’s expanding economy. In Venezuela, the strategy has gone awry. In recent months, CDB has extended loan maturities and eased repayment terms, allowing the country to send it less oil […]

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Hugo Chavez’s Legacy: One of the Worst Crime Rates in the World

For years in Caracas, as in most cities, the sun went down before the bars lit up. No more. Stop by La Cita, a Spanish-style pub near the heart of downtown, and find clients like Freddy Barraiz, an upstanding 64-year-old physician, knocking back glasses of wine in bright sunshine. “It’s like a race against time,” Barraiz said. “By 6:00, you start to get nervous.” With shootings and kidnappings an almost daily occurrence in this city once known for animated nightlife, crowds at restaurants and clubs thin out at dark. Businesses are cutting back hours and accommodating earlier crowds. “What keeps us going is lunch,” lamented La Cita’s owner, Javier Lopez. Venezuela was never crime-free. But long-standing problems in law enforcement have been exacerbated by erratic policies of the late Hugo Chavez, who favored military force over traditional policing. Since soldiers have little training in delinquency control, crime has exploded […]

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Venezuela finds new front in attack on U.S. fracking: water

VIENNA Venezuela sought to open a new front in its months-long verbal assault on the U.S. shale oil industry on Wednesday, suggesting it posed a grave threat to water supplies. In the latest criticism of the hydraulic fracturing technology that has yielded a gusher of crude supplies in Venezuela’s biggest oil market, oil minister Asdrubal Chavez cited the "huge environmental impact" from shale. "This does not seem to raise any concerns among the governments promoting it or the companies involved," he told an OPEC seminar in Vienna attended by chief executives of some of the world’s biggest oil companies, including Exxon and BP, both of which operate in U.S. shale. "It is a responsibility of the conventional crude oil-producing countries to develop price mechanisms that take into account these economic and geopolitical actors that promote technologies that threaten the availability of the fundamental resource for human existence: water." The […]

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Venezuela, Russia’s Rosneft agree on $14 billion oil, gas investment

CARACAS Venezuela and Russia’s top oil producer, Rosneft, have agreed on around $14 billion in investment in the South American OPEC country’s oil and gas sector, President Nicolas Maduro said on Wednesday evening. Maduro said he met with the chief executive of state-owned Rosneft, Igor Sechin, earlier on Wednesday, in the company of PDVSA [PDVSA.UL] President Eulogio del Pino and National Assembly boss and Socialist Party No. 2 Diosdado Cabello. "We had a great meeting and agreed on investment of over $14 billion," said Maduro during a televised broadcast, adding the funds would go toward doubling Venezuela’s oil production. PDVSA has formal ambitious targets to double national production to 6 million barrels a day by 2019, with 4 million of that projected to come from the Orinoco Belt, but few industry experts or foreign investors expect those goals to be met. Speaking at a Socialist Party event broadcast on […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple