More plot thickening from the Sunday Binnis Post online...,
On July 14 in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuelan government tax auditors and a prosecutor went to the offices of Chevron, the second-largest US oil company.They seized boxes of records to build a case that San Ramon, California-based Chevron and 21 other energy companies owe Venezuela €2.4 billion in back taxes.
Chavez, who refers to US president George Bush as ‘Mr Danger', said on June 5 that the US was trying to install a global dictatorship. US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice described Chavez as a “negative force'‘ in the region.
just goes to show, you gotta let a ho be a ho...,
On July 14 in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuelan government tax auditors and a prosecutor went to the offices of Chevron, the second-largest US oil company.
They seized boxes of records to build a case that San Ramon, California-based Chevron and 21 other energy companies owe Venezuela €2.4 billion in back taxes.
The raid is part of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's push to squeeze more money out of foreign companies that want to pump oil from the world's fifth-largest petroleum exporter.
Since last October, he has raised heavy-oil royalty fees to as much as 30 per cent from 1 per cent, begun paying for some services in nonconvertible bolivares instead of US dollars, and ordered oil well contracts converted into government-controlled joint ventures.
Chavez wants to use the revenue to pay for homes, clinics and schools for the 58 per cent of Venezuelan families who live on less than $200 a month.
Since taking office in February 1999, Chavez has embarked on a socialist revolution, seizing ranches to hand over to the poor and starting a TV news network with promotional ads featuring a swastika painted on a US flag.
Chavez says he's using oil money to bankroll a quest to become Latin America's leader against US-style capitalism.
In a May 4 speech, he said: “Being rich is bad'‘ and “Jesus Christ was a socialist'‘.
Chavez, a close friend of Cuban president Fidel Castro, sends crude oil to Cuba in exchange for doctors to staff 3,000 neighbourhood clinics.
In June, he pledged subsidised oil for poor Caribbean nations, such as Grenada.
But Chevron and its competitors haven't been scared off, because Venezuela has the largest reserves in the western hemisphere. The oil companies want to invest $30 billion in Venezuela, which is the fourth-largest supplier of crude to the US, according to the Venezuelan Hydrocarbons Association.
Chavez says all companies are welcome in his country.
“Foreign companies have been here for the last century exploiting oil and gas, and they'll have all the space they've been able to have so far,” he says.
“It's just that they will have to pay the royalties, they will have to pay the income tax. If they don't, we will go after them.”
Venezuela's tax agency stated on August 11 that it was seeking to attach more than 280 billion bolivares (€106million) in assets from Royal Dutch Shell in a dispute over what the country says is unpaid back taxes.
The prize in Venezuela is the tropical flatlands north of the Orinoco river, beneath which, according to Chavez, lie 230 billion barrels of heavy crude, one of the largest oil deposits in the world.
Chavez, who has used his clout as leader of the third-largest member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to curb Venezuela's output by 20 per cent since taking office, now says he wants to boost production.
Most of the decline came from the state-owned producer, Petroleos de Venezuela, where Chavez fired half the workforce to break a 2002-2003 strike aimed at ousting him. Daily output at PDVSA has tumbled to about 2million barrels from 2.92 million barrels in 1998.
Foreign oil companies took up the slack, doubling their production to about 1.12 million barrels a day last year.
Now, Chavez says he wants to attract €8 billion more from foreign oil companies to help boost Venezuela's total oil production to 5 million barrels a day by 2009.
“This government is your ally,” Chavez told foreign oil executives in March. “We are not chasing anyone away from Venezuela.”
At the same time, Chavez claimed that the Bush administration was trying to force him to commit suicide and he threatened that exports to the US would be cut off if he were to meet an untimely death.
Chavez, who refers to US president George Bush as ‘Mr Danger', said on June 5 that the US was trying to install a global dictatorship. US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice described Chavez as a “negative force'‘ in the region.
Last Monday, television evangelist Pat Robertson told viewers of his 700 Club TV programme that the US should assassinate Chavez to stop him from becoming a “launching pad for communists'‘.
Venezuelan vice president Jose Vicente Rangel responded by saying Robertson's remarks were “criminal'‘. US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said at a press briefing that Robertson's views did not “represent the policy of the United States'‘.
Unless new reserves are tapped in countries like Venezuela in the next 15 years, global oil output won't keep pace with demand, according to a report by New York securities firm Sanford C Bernstein.
The report forecasts that demand for oil will grow by 1.8 per cent a year until 2020 to 102.7 million barrels a day.
Global oil production capacity will be 102.1 million barrels a day, the report says.
Concern about future supply has helped to push crude oil prices up more than fivefold to a record $67.10 a barrel on August 12 from $12.28 on February 2, 1999, when Chavez was sworn in as president.
Venezuela is one of the few major oil producers that allow foreign investment. Saudi Arabia allows only its state oil company to pump crude.
And Venezuela has been more open than other countries in Latin America such as Mexico, which bars foreign companies from exploiting the second-biggest oil reserves in Latin America.
Oil companies such as Shell have acquiesced to Chavez's demands. On July 14, the government ordered Shell, whose 90 years of working in Venezuela includes having its wells nationalised in 1975, to pay $131 million of back taxes.
Shell says it has paid all of its taxes.
Norway's state-run Statoil, Paris-based Total and Chevron have been hardest hit by Chavez's new rules, because they manage wells for PDVSA and are shareholders in the four heavy-crude production ventures in the Orinoco belt.
Statoil, Total and Conoco-Phillips may have to pay €260 million in back taxes for their heavy-oil ventures in the Orinoco belt, according to oil minister Ramirez.
Chavez is also considering a reduction in Venezuela's dependence on oil sales to the US, which accounts for about 60 per cent of the nation's crude exports. He signed agreements to boost oil sales to Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Paraguay and Uruguay.
He also proposed building a pipeline to Pacific Oceanports in Colombia to ship more crude to China.
The US imports 15 per cent of its crude oil from Venezuela, which is just a four to five-day tanker trip from Texas refineries.
Oil is a pervasive part of life in Venezuela, where petrol stations don't even post the price, because it is fixed at 18 cents per gallon. Revenue from crude exports funds half the government's budget, and oil prices have driven Venezuela's economy since the 1920s.
Last year, as crude prices soared again, Venezuela's economy grew a record 17 per cent.
In 1998 Chavez won a landslide election victory by pledging a revolution that would use oil revenue to spread equality. Since taking office, he has taken advantage of surging oil prices by boosting spending on programmes for the poor to a projected €10.6 billion this year - almost half the national budget. This has helped him to survive an attempted coup and recall referendum.
PDVSA dispenses €3.2 billion a year for everything from cooperatives that make the red T-shirts Chavez supporters wear to monthly stipends for 700,000 people enrolled on adult education courses.
On some days, PDVSA's 13-floor concrete headquarters in Caracas draws scores of people seeking funds for social programmes, known as missions.
“For a long time, our oil went to the rich, but as you can see, here that's changed,” says Wuikelman Angel, 35, who manages workshops, a youth centre and a clinic that PDVSA built last year on a three-hectare shuttered gasoline depot in Caracas's Catia slum.
On one morning in late June, about 50 people wait at the €5.7 million complex, flanked by a verdant hill covered with tin-roofed shacks and piles of garbage, for free treatment at a two-storey clinic with a new X-ray machine and a pediatric ward.
In a warehouse across a rose-lined square, a dozen people make final adjustments to machinery at a shoemaking cooperative, one of thousands of government-financed companies that are part of Chavez's plan to give jobs to the poor.
It's all financed by PDVSA, starting with the cooperative's first order for 250 pairs of black leather shoes, which were donated to victims of a mudslide.
Across the road is a government supermarket that sells food at a 33 per cent discount - one of 12,000 built with PDVSA funds since Chavez took power.
In addition to the PDVSA money, Chavez is using €4.8 billion of the country's €23.5 billion of central bank reserves for government spending.
Chavez is stepping up social spending to build support for a re-election bid in December 2006. His approval rating was 61 per cent in the second quarter - that's down eight percentage points from the start of the year.
Despite demands for more taxes, Chevron and Repsol plan to expand in the Orinoco area, which would involve drilling as many as 2,000 wells that use steam to force tar-like crude oil out of the ground.
The Orinoco Belt, with as many as 300 billion barrels of oil, may be a critical area for Chevron to add reserves.
Chevron and Repsol hope to negotiate an agreement that will allow them to use their expertise to run the wells, pipelines and refineries planned for the Orinoco.
If Venezuela is seeking to expand production, there is no doubt that the Orinoco is the area to develop.
28 August 2005 By Michael Smith and Peter Wilson
or "Heritage Foundation Flunky in Philly Fails to Make Cents"
this is what I've been saying all along...when it comes down to making empirical arguments, these gatekeepers are ass-out because the stuff they're talking about is nonsense.
the black repeaters of this stuff are similarly unable to make a sound argument...i guess mcwhorter comes closest, but he is picky about the numbers he uses and might be better off sticking to linguistics.
uncle sam's plantation ain't never had this much 'baccy - but it is up in smoke.
Posted by: Temple3 | August 31, 2005 at 08:24 AM
chavez is going to sell 66,000 barrels of crude a day to help US poor communities, hospitals, religious communities, schools - so Jesse is locking down those Citgo po folk franchises...., just giving the bush clan the finger in everything he does...
I love it!
Posted by: cnulan | August 31, 2005 at 11:47 AM