May have been posted already, sorry if so.

......But the move that received the most attention from the business press was the government's legal maneuvers over the Las Cristinas gold mine, Venezuela's largest gold deposit. The stock of Toronto-based Crystallex, which had the rights to operate Las Cristinas, plunged and in December 2008, Reuters reported: "Crystallex International filed a letter with Venezuela's government claiming that the country's denial of approvals to mine the Las Cristinas gold deposit goes against a treaty between Canada and Venezuela."

Despite his company not owning any properties in Venezuela, the head of Barrick Gold, Peter Munk, has repeatedly attacked Chavez. In a August 2007 letter to the Financial Times headlined "Stop Chavez' Demagoguery Before it is Too Late", he wrote: "Your editorial 'Chavez in Control' was way too benign a characterization of a dangerous dictator - the latest of a type who takes over a nation through the democratic process, and then perverts or abolishes it to perpetuate his own power … aren't we ignoring the lessons of history and forgetting that the dictators Hitler, Mugabe, Pol Pot and so on became heads of state by a democratic process? … autocratic demagogues in the Chavez mode get away with [it] until their countries become totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Slobadan Milosevic's Serbia … Let us not give President Chavez a chance to do the same step-by- step transformation of Venezuela." Munk, among Embassy magazine's "Top 50 People Influencing Canadian Foreign Policy", sees Venezuela's reforms as a threat to his profit-making possibilities and as an example that might be replicated elsewhere. It is a view likely held by most of Canada's foreign focused business community, especially in the resource sector..........

http://www.hamsayeh.net/hamsayehnet_iran-international%20news928.htm