Mr. Ramirez:
We address this letter to you
with a grave sense of responsibility because
we feel indignant about the atrocities your regime has committed during these
last 15 years.
We consider you one of the five
worst enemies of the Venezuelan nation during this period of time, together
with Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Jose Vicente Rangel and Jorge Giordani. We
say this on the basis of your participation in the sowing of class and social hatred,
the waste of our resources, the delivery of national sovereignty in the hands
of Castro’s Cuba and the mortgaging of our oil to China.
Specifically, your performance as
Minister of Energy and Petroleum, President of Petroleos de Venezuela, PDVSA, Czar
of the Economy, Coordinator of the House-building “Mission” and Vice-president
of the government party, illustrates the administrative chaos prevailing in
Venezuela. No one can undertake so many simultaneous tasks efficiently, no
matter how competent. And you are far from being competent.
Your demonstrated incompetence
would be sufficient reason to demand your resignation but you represent
something much worse. One, you are a symbol of corruption because you have
accepted tasks for which you are not qualified; two, you have incurred in corruption
by performing these tasks without the required transparency and accountability.
We say:
·
As Minister you were directly responsible for
the attempted fraud of Free Market Petroleum, a ghost company created by U.S.
senator Jack Kemp and the Venezuelan regime to acquire up to 50,000 barrels per
day of high quality Mesa crude for three years, to resell them to third
parties. This brokerage would have given the intermediary outfit some $55
million in profits. This fraud was denounced in the U.S media and had to be
abandoned;
·
You are responsible for the delivery to Cuba,
for some seven years now, of up to 100,000 barrels of oil at a significant subsidy,
highly detrimental to the nation, which represents a cumulative loss of about $25-30 billion and keeps growing
every day;
·
You are responsible for the contracting with
companies of Formula One car racing, to allow a Venezuelan driver to run under
your patronage. This contract calls for payment of some $50 million per year
and is both immoral for a poor country with many needs and a failure, as the
driver has had a disastrous performance;
·
You are responsible for the manner in which the
heavy oil deposits of the Orinoco region have been managed. You have inflated
the volume of proven reserves in violation of internationally accepted norms, you
have failed to build the required upgrading plants, altered production statistics
and contracted operations, for ideological reasons, with a host of companies that do not have the
capability to do the task;
·
You are responsible for the contracting of an
offshore drilling barge, the Aban Pearl, to an intermediary company created for
that purpose, for an amount superior to that received by the owner of the
equipment. There was no valid reason not to contract this operation directly.
As it is, the intermediary company obtained undue profits. Who are they? Where did
the money go? No investigation has ever
been made;
·
You are responsible for the contracting of land
drilling equipment with ghost companies, as admitted by former Director of the
company, Luis Vierma to the Venezuelan National Assembly, who claimed he was
just following the orders of the Board;
·
You are responsible for the assault, by a
company financial adviser, of the company’s Pension Fund, which has generated a
huge loss to the nation and to the retired and active employees of the company.
The guilty party has been tried and convicted in the U.S. but Venezuelan justice
has not played any role in punishing this fraud;
·
You are responsible for the no-bid contracting
of millions of dollars in electrical equipment and installation work to a
company, Derwick Associates, without the required experience and infrastructure,
presumably receiving huge commissions that could have been eliminated if contracting
had been directly with the companies capable of doing the work;
·
You are responsible for the unusually high index
of industrial accidents taking place in the company, including the Amuay
refinery disaster that took many lives and represented millions of dollars in
losses. This accident was due to lack of maintenance, as concluded by all
independent investigations;
·
You are reported to have made significant
deposits in Florida banks without transparency. Currently an investigation of a
possible in-between of yours in this area of the U.S. is being conducted;
·
You are co-responsible for the disastrous foreign
exchange control system, in which members of the regime have reported loses to
the nation for $25-30 billion;
·
You are co-responsible for the murky management of
the Development Fund, FONDEN, in which billions of dollars have been used without
transparency or accountability. In a Memo to the former Venezuelan president,
now diseased, you mentioned the authority of a small group over the use of this
fund, without accountability, as a
positive factor;
·
You are responsible for defining the current
economic and financial chaos prevailing
in the country as a “deeply successful model”, as expressed during the recent
meeting with opposition representatives. You should know that there is a national
collapse of industrial and agricultural production, that essential foodstuff has to be
imported and that imports often arrive in a rotten state due to the corruption
prevailing in the importing process and in the ports run by a Cuban-Venezuelan
company; see: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/140420/se-pudrieron-alimentos-valorados-en-bs-10-millones
;
·
You are responsible for the critical growth of
the company debt, now estimated at some $120 billion, for having increased
five-fold the amount of employees while production has decreased significantly,
for mortgaging the oil to China in exchange for loan which have not been used
to develop the company’s activities but for current expenditures by the central
government and for promoting the exodus of international companies from the Orinoco
region while bringing in companies without technical know-how, for political
and ideological reasons;
·
You are responsible for the significant deficit
of natural gas in the country, which has affected critically the industries of
the Guayana region, in southern Venezuela. This is taking place at the time in
which gas flaring is at an all-time high. Venezuela is importing gas from
Colombia through a gas pipeline that was built to transport Venezuelan gas to
Colombia!
·
You are guilty of having prostituted the company’s
management by publicly saying that only those loyal to the regime could work in
the company, politicizing what should be a commercial and professional
activity;
·
You are guilty of promoting a suicidal policy of
relations with the private sector, insisting on having the control and majority
shares of the mixed companies in the Orinoco region, without having the required
financial and human resources to lead the activity. As a result these activities
are essentially stagnant and private companies hesitate in investing
significant funds in an uncertain operation. Your frequently proclaimed petroleum
sovereignty is non-existent;
This long list
of disasters, frauds, abuses and management failures is not yet complete. We
have to add your tragic incapacity to recognize errors and modify the course of
action. You insist in that all is going
according to plan. You resemble a pilot soothing passengers over the speakers
system, while the plane plummets down to earth. This combination of corruption,
inefficiency and stubbornness makes you one of the worst enemies of the nation.
You should be thoroughly
investigated and dismissed from your positions. In fact, you should have
resigned long ago, since an honest
manager should refuse to follow suicidal orders. In a future trial you should
receive the maximum penalty allowed by our laws. Unfortunately our laws do not
contemplate a punishment harsh enough to compensate for all the harm you have
done.
Gustavo Coronel,
Eddie Ramirez, Ernesto Fronjosa, Horacio Medina, Ricardo Godoy- Vizcarrondo,
Robert Bottome, Nelson Hernández, Luis Eduardo Santana, Juan Vicente Vera, Axel
Capriles, José Mendez (JMV Consulting), Gustavo Fernandez, Tomas Lefkovits, Rafaél Pardo, Enrique Vasquez, Eduardo Roche Lander,
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