May 23, 2023, Caracas
Con Maduro program
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro blamed the Venezuelan opposition for being behind an embezzlement of the State in coordination with the U.S. Government, resources that are used to finance their primary elections scheduled for next October.
During his program Con Maduro+, the Head of State denounced that, specifically, it was former Deputy Dinorah Figuera (fugitive from Venezuelan Justice), who received more than 300 million dollars to promote the opposition presidential nominations, in search of a common candidate for the presidential elections scheduled for 2024.
“Figuera has just been deposited 346 million dollars from a bank account that belongs to the country to finance the primaries of the failed right wing, specifically to finance the presidential candidacies”, stressed Maduro in a conversation with the head of the PSUV bench in the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, reported RT.
These are resources from Caracas that remained blocked in US banks and were delivered to the National Assembly elected in 2015, whose mandate ended in 2021 and, despite which, the US recognizes it as an authority after the right wing itself withdrew its backing to former “interim president” Juan Guaidó, last December.
In his program, Maduro again denounced the “kidnapping” of Citgo, a company of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.’s (PDVSA) subsidiary in the U.S., which was placed by Washington under control of the opposition, and whose sale by auction has been spuriously authorized by the Treasury Department.
“The U.S. Government has withheld from us, just in Citgo, 4 billion dollars of annual profits for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and now running. These are benefits that were for the good of the population”, he denounced, in allusion to the money that the Venezuelan State has stopped receiving as a result of the seizure of the oil subsidiary, without counting other Venezuelan assets abroad, frozen by the U.S. policy of economic asphyxiation.
Maduro recalled in this regard the recent approval by the National Assembly of the Law for the Protection of the Assets, Rights and Interests of the Republic and its Entities Abroad, which he has already signed.
The Bolivarian President described the legislation as “a new legal, juridical and constitutional instrument to protect the assets and patrimony that belong to all Venezuelans”.
As reported by the financial observatory Bloomberg at the beginning of this month, the so-called Democratic Unitary Platform, which gathers the Venezuelan political right wing and is now articulated around the defunct National Assembly of 2015, took control of at least 347 million dollars coming from Venezuelan bank accounts frozen in the United States.
According to the note, reviewed by misionverdad.com, the right-wing sectors have financed their operations since 2019 with the money from the seized assets, due to the fact that the U.S. State Department certified “opposition officials” (sic) to regain access.
The money is considered by the opposition as a “fund” which they have called “for the liberation of Venezuela and attention to risk cases”.
The validity of this supposed legislative body is non-existent, warns misionverdad.com, it functions through another pseudo-legal construct called Legislative Delegate Commission and is headed, precisely, by Dinorah Figuera, who has been acting as “president” since last January.
However, the note explains, the 2015 Assembly “approved” itself the partial reform of the Law of the Fund for the liberation of Venezuela and attention to cases of vital risk last December 30, to inject a little more than 49 million dollars to another false instance with a bombastic name, the so-called Statute of transition to democracy to reestablish the validity of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which will finance several programs aimed at overthrowing the government by supporting the right wing and fostering subversion.
Source: Juventud Rebelde, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English