The President of the Republic, Nicolás Maduro, repudiated the robbery of the Citgo oil refining company -owned by Venezuela-, by the United States government (USA).
“They came up with an unworthy resolution, which is a direct message of surrender. They have decided to hand over Citgo to a group of unknown people,” denounced the head of state, leading the mobilization of thousands of Venezuelan workerswhich toured the streets of Caracas on Monday.
For this reason, Maduro described the action against the subsidiary of the state oil company PDVSA as a “blatant robbery”, of a company estimated at more than 8 billion dollars and more than 10,000 gasoline pumps in the US.
“Supposedly they will hand it over to the leadership of the last National Assembly (AN), which no longer exists in Venezuela. A people that none of us know, who live abroad running away like rats, ”he wielded.
OFAC license
Earlier this Monday, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a license allowing the extinct parliament elected in 2015 to negotiate some outstanding debts related to the Venezuelan company. This leaves open the possibility of auctioning it off to cancel the commitments with creditors who have not been paid for four years.
Slap to the Bogotá conference
The first national president manifested that the decision on Citgo “is a mockery and a slap” to the International Conference on the political process in Venezuela that took place in Bogotá last week.
In this conference convened by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, the participating countries “almost unanimously” asked the US government to lift all existing sanctions on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
“All this opposition is complicit in the looting and robbery against the properties of Venezuela, we must commit ourselves, more and more, to the recovery of our homeland, through work, union, and the creation of wealth,” Maduro reiterated.
