The theft of public money from the sale of oil, as occurred between October and December 2022, was due to a “political plan”, in the opinion of the Attorney General, Tarek William Saab.
“The conclusion is clear: generate an implosion of the Venezuelan economy to seek an unfavorable political balance for the Venezuelan state,” declared the Attorney General, who was a guest this Saturday on the program Situational analysis Driven by Oscar Schemel.
During that program, Saab referred to the five plots being investigated by the Public Ministry at the request of the National Police against Corruption and in which public officials from the state-owned PDVSA, Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) and Cortones de Venezuela (Cartoven) are involved. ) as well as mayoralties and the Judiciary.
For these events there are 61 people arrested, 43 of them from the oil industry. But the Prosecutor clarified that corruption does not exclusively involve public agencies and institutions, because there are private parties that, such as businessmen, merchants “can encourage, incite a public official to commit a crime.” This circumstance was classified by the head of the Public Ministry as “a compromise, a concert of totally negative, rotten interests.”
The Prosecutor stressed that the modus operandi of the mafia that PDVSA detected implied the execution of “parallel operations”. This operation began with the assignment of crude oil shipments to the National Superintendence of Cryptoactives (Sunacrip) and to individuals, in breach of contracting regulations.
“After they marketed the illegally assigned crude, they failed to comply with the corresponding payments to PDVSA. The income from these parallel operations did not enter the State… and with the issue of cryptocurrencies they were laundering them, they were disappearing to generate an economic crisis that fortunately was stopped; we can say that the operation was truncated. There is obviously damage, ”he explained.
“Why all that money, where and for what; obviously obeyed a disastrous political plan that has not only been prosecuted and prosecuted but has also been revealed, discovered and those responsible detained”, indicated the Attorney General who described this corruption plot as “highly explosive”.
The conspiracy
March 26 Last News published a report titled The Three Legged Conspiracy where it is pointed out that the Anti-Corruption Operation started on March 17, is the way in which President Nicolás Maduro is coming out of the past “to a great conspiracy”.
Deputies close to the Head of State explained on that occasion that such a conspiracy had three legs, one of which was planted in the oil industry from where they sought to achieve what the former United States ambassador to Venezuela, William Bronfield, proposed in 2018 to “accelerate the collapse of the Venezuelan economy.
A second leg of that alleged conspiracy was in the Judiciary, used to tell the world that in Venezuela there is no rule of law because justice is traded in dollars.
The emblematic example of this was the release of a subject allegedly linked to the criminal organization Tren del Llano, identified as Oswaldo José Cheremos Carrasquel.
This subject allegedly paid $240,000 in cash and trucks to obtain a measure that placed him on the streets between January 9 and February 15 when he was recaptured.
For this fact, the then president of the Caracas Criminal Judicial Circuit, Cristóbal Cornieles, and Judge José Maxcimino Márquez García, who granted Cheremos Carrasquel freedom, are being detained. Likewise, Mario Aquino, assistant to Cornieles and the lawyer Loreannys Mariana Mejías Díaz, assistant to deputy Antonio Benavides Torres.
The third leg of the alleged conspiracy movement is the use of criminal organizations to cause chaos in the country, as they intended days before Operation Gideon, when the Wilexis Gang carried out a series of shootings in the José Félix Rivas neighborhood, Petare, between end of April and beginning of May 2020.
Operation Gideon intended to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro and place a board chaired by Juan Guaidó, according to revelations from its participants.
The sources consulted point to the United States Anti-Narcotics Agency (DEA) and the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as participants in this “great conspiracy.” They even dusted off the file according to which Venezuela is a permissive country with drug trafficking. To do this, they intended to set up a false operation where Venezuelan soldiers appeared transporting drug shipments, a source explained.
The Attorney General has said that all public officials prosecuted for the PDVSA corruption scheme will be charged with treason, among other crimes.
