Pedro Maldonado: Head of state steel company and six other officials arrested in Venezuela’s anti-corruption purge | international

The anti-corruption purge of officials who diverted oil money is still active in Venezuela. The Bolivarian intelligence service, CEPIN, and the recently launched National Anti-Corruption Police announced Thursday the arrest of the deputy minister of basic industries and head of the Venezuelan Guayana Foundation, Pedro Maldonado, and six other officials of this state’s assembly. The Steel Consortium, on charges of being linked to a corruption network close to Minister Tarek El-Aissami, which has led to the imprisonment of 25 people so far.

The action relates to the attack on corrupt officials carried out by the government of Nicolás Maduro, in what is now called The falling down process. Maldonado held various positions in the Chavumadorista administration, and like the deputy Hojbel Roa, also arrested, is considered a figure close to El Aissami politically and personally. Since this afternoon, the police have taken control of the areas adjacent to the CVG headquarters in the city of Puerto Ordaz. The group of managers was surprised by the full working sessions.

The anti-corruption police themselves justified the action in a public statement, saying that the “meticulous investigations” that had been carried out, together with the “statements of the criminal gang being prosecuted”, allowed the aforementioned mafia to continue to be dismantled. That diverted national profits from the sale of oil through exchange operations.

The lawyer, who graduated from the University of Los Andes, like El Aissami, Maldonado, a technical cadre from Chavista Numiclatura, was president of the Venezuelan Central Bank in 2017, in the midst of the collapse of the national economy. He held administrative positions in the Department of Identity and Immigration and the Ministry of Interior and Justice. From 2010 to 2014 he was Chairman of the National Telecommunications Commission, Conatel. The charges against him have not yet been announced.

The extraordinary anti-corruption measures implemented by the government of Nicolás Maduro have been the word of mouth among Venezuelans these days. Indignant Maduro and Diosdado Cabello, the regime’s number two, appeared repeatedly on television, promising more punishment and asserting that the actions against the corrupt were “dangerous”. “I have no doubt, we will emerge stronger from this crisis,” Capello declared.

The Venezuelan opposition, which has spent years denouncing the wrongdoings and transgressions of the Chavisa government in corruption cases, and which has blamed the Maduro administration for the serious social crisis at this time, has maintained a relatively conservative stance in the face of these scandals. . Maduro and Cabello, as well as Jorge Rodriguez, have issued various threats to some of their leaders.

State media accompanied Chavismo’s anti-corruption slogans with its promotions and opinion spaces, along with the PSUV and other public power holders. Attorney General Tareq William Saab stated that in addition to the aforementioned crimes, the defendants will be charged with “treason of the homeland”. A rally was held in Caracas under the slogan The honest ones are more. But the depth and squalor of the stories of corruption around El Aissami caused apparent disenchantment in the Chavista militancy.

Founded in 1960, Corporación Venezolana de Guayana has been another excellent and promising model of state administration since the days of democracy in which the area of ​​devastation had gone through. Its decline began in the 1990s, and it is a holding company that manages all chains of aluminum and steel production, as well as iron extraction and electricity generation. Siderúrgica del Orinoco, Sidor, one of its member companies, is the largest steel company in the Andean region and one of the largest in Latin America.

As happened in the Venezuelan Ministry of Petroleum, there have been numerous complaints and reports of abuses and corruption on full hands during the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in steel companies in Guyana. Some of them are listed in an annotated book written by Damien Pratt, called Guyana, the miracle in reversein which established overpaying circuits, reel distribution mafias, and illegal cargo diversions are alluded to.

The collapse of the national electrical system, which began in 2015 – also due to excessive corruption – seriously disrupted the work of the CVG companies, since it was necessary to close many production cells in order to save voltage and exacerbate the national blackouts. But in recent months, there has been an improvement in its operations and a moderate increase in production.

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