A few days after the ruling of the Venezuelan Supreme Court confirmed the disqualification of opposition leader María Corina Machado as a presidential candidate against the re-election of Nicolás Maduro on January 26, a press investigation of a digital portal Armando.info. Criticizing the regime, it exposed the scope of decades of looting under the governments of Hugo Chávez and Maduro.
By: Time
At a time when the regime is intensifying repression, not only against Machado and the protesters, but also against the teachers' union, against officials and non-commissioned officers, without any evidence, it is related to a subversive plan, Armando.info rates the amount of part of the missing money at 56,000 million dollars.
Money has been circulating through freely allocated funds created by Chávez since the end of the last century to manage the resources of an oil bonanza that has brought the country more than $700,000 million in revenue. This is not reflected in the improvement in the lives of ordinary Venezuelans.
The exact figure is 56,036,854,000 dollars, calculated on the basis of official reports on the management of dozens of special funds. These are documents from the Ministry of Planning and Finance, the National Treasury and the Bank for Economic and Social Development (PANDES).
The documents were shared by the Organized Corruption and Crime Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international network of investigative journalists who pursue and expose links between criminal organizations, corrupt practices and politicians and government officials in dozens of countries around the world.
The groundwork was carried out by Venezuelan investigative reporters Valentina Lares and Marcos David Valverde, who were correspondents for this newspaper in Caracas.
You can read the full note here Time
