Pedro Maldonado: President of state steel company and six officials arrested in anti-corruption sweep in Venezuela | International

An anti-corruption crackdown on officials who diverted oil money remains intense in Venezuela. The Bolivarian Investigative Service, Sebin, and the recently launched National Anti-Corruption Police announced on Thursday the arrest of Pedro Maldonado, the Deputy Minister of Basic Industries and President of the Venezuelan Corporation of Guyana, and six officials of this state board. The Steel Federation has so far taken 25 people to jail on charges linked to a corruption network close to Minister Tareck El Aissami.

The practice is associated with a crackdown on corrupt officials by the government of Nicolás Maduro, as it is now called. Operation Fallout Whoever Fallen. Maldonado has held various positions in the Saomaturista administration, and detained deputy Hakbel Roa is considered close to El Issamy, both politically and personally. The vicinity of the CVG headquarters in the city of Puerto Ordaz was taken over by the police since the afternoon. The team of managers was amazing at the full working sessions.

The anti-corruption police themselves justified the practice in a public statement, allowing the continuation of the elimination of the aforementioned mafia, with “rigorous investigations” and “reports of organized crime under investigation”. A network that diverted national profits from oil sales through transfer operations.

A lawyer with a degree from the University of Los Andes, El Aissami, Maldonado, a technical staff member of Chavista Nomenclatura, was head of the Central Bank of Venezuela in 2017 amid the collapse of the national economy. He held executive positions in the Identity and Immigration Service and the Ministry of Home Affairs and Justice. From 2010 to 2014, he was the chairman of the National Telecommunication Commission. The charges against him have not yet been made public.

The extraordinary anti-corruption practices carried out by the government of Nicolás Maduro are the talk of the town these days among Venezuelans. Both Maduro and Diostato Cabello, the second-in-command, have made several angry appearances on television, vowing more sanctions and a “serious” crackdown on corruption. “I have no doubt we will emerge stronger from this crisis,” Capello declared.

The Venezuelan opposition, which has condemned the Chavista government’s abuses and excesses on corruption issues for years and blamed the Maduro administration for the current severe social crisis, has adopted a relatively prudent approach in the face of these scandals. . Maduro and Cabello and Jorge Rodriguez have issued various threats to some of their leaders.

Along with Venezuela’s ruling United Socialist Party and other public power holders, state media have accompanied their promotions and opinion polls with Chavismo’s anti-corruption slogans. The Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, announced that in addition to the aforementioned crimes, the defendants would be charged with “treason against the homeland.” A rally has been organized in Caracas under the slogan There are many honest people. However, the depth and tragedy of the corruption stories surrounding El Issamy has led to a clear disaffection with Chavista militancy.

Founded in 1960, the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana is another great and promising model of state governance from the days of democracy the region experienced. Its decline began in the 1990s. It is a holding company that manages all aluminum and steel production chains, iron extraction and power generation. One of its member companies, Siderurgica del Orinoco, Sidor is the largest steel company in the Andean region and the largest in Latin America.

There have been numerous complaints and reports of rampant excesses and corruption in Guyana’s steel companies during the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, as happened in Venezuela’s Ministry of Petroleum. Some of them are described in the concept book by Damian Pratt Guyana, the miracle in reverseIt mentions overbilling of established circuits, mafias in distribution of reels and illegal cargo diversion.

The collapse of the national electricity system that began in 2015 – due to rampant corruption – necessitated the shutdown of many generating cells to conserve voltage and boost the national grid, severely disrupting the operations of CVG companies. However, in recent months, there has been improvement in its processes and a moderate increase in production.

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