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.”