The auditing of the use of Venezuelan aid, channeled through private mechanisms as a parallel budget, has been an insistent popular demand since the first oil industry cooperation agreement between the two countries was signed by Presidents Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega in 2007
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Economists are still debating what the long-term impact would have been had these funds been invested in prioritized development areas through a national strategy and on the basis of solid institutional channels. What no one denies is that the short-term strategy adopted by Ortega in order to secure Venezuelan aid cleared his path of obstacles to install an authoritarian, pro-corporate regime.
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According to the International Monetary Fund, Venezuela announced that “all assets and liabilities related to the oil cooperation agreement are in the process of being transferred from a private financial cooperative (Caruna) to a Nicaraguan limited liability company (Albanisa), co-owned by the Nicaraguan State oil distribution company Petronic (49%) and the Venezuelan national oil company PDVSA (51%).
These are the kinds of questions that ought to be urgently debated in Nicaragua, because of the implications they have for our immediate future and any agenda seeking change.
This means that the debt arising from the oil cooperation agreement (i.e. the liabilities) will cease to be the responsibility of Caruna and will be transferred to Albanisa, and that the assets derived from investments made through the oil fund will also be fully controlled by Albanisa.
Some of these assets include the Banco Corporativo (“Corportate Bank”), Nicaragua’s channel 8, radio broadcasters, the Seminole Hotel, the DNP service station chain, thermal and wind-power generators, the energy distribution company Disnorte y Dissur, livestock farms, the Albalinisa export company, construction companies, the fuel storage tanks of the unfinished refinery, in short, everything that has been financed with money coming from the oil agreement.
The difference now is that, while Caruna was previously a fully Nicaraguan private entity, 51% of Albanisa is owned by Venezuela’s PVSA. Does this mean that Venezuela is cancelling Nicaragua’s debt by having PDVSA acquire the company? Is Venezuela asking for control over investments by the Alba group in Nicaragua, which had hitherto been granted entirely to its private partner, President Ortega, or is it merely a formal mechanism to consolidate yet another private transfer?
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