Corporations target the economic heart of Venezuela

Photo: Mission Truth

Media and financial harassment against PDVSA: to make the bond swap fail at all costs

Pdvsa's bond exchange strategy launched on September 16, deferred in pairs of opportunities in search of greater resources, was successful: the Venezuelan oil company managed to exchange 52.57% of the amount offered for the operation, saving 2 thousand 899 million after shifting its foreign debt payments from 2017 to 2020.

In other words, the economic heart of the country - PDVSA -, the support of 95% of national income, was in the short and medium term a critical scenario for its financial stability and therefore for the whole country.

As discussed at the time by Mission Truth, this operation was attacked by credit ratings sentenced to fraud by investors in the United States in 2008: Standard and Poor's, Fitch and Moody's.

These agencies gave a negative rating to the operation, seeking to generate distrust and fear in investors not to participate. The objective was not financial, but political: as long as the operation would fail the financial situation of PDVSA and the country would tend to become more precarious, aggravating - and politically directing - the economic malaise of the population, since the margin of maneuver for Importing basic goods - food and medicine - would be reduced to the extreme.

Other tanks were added from the media and business front. The New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, to name the media with the greatest impact on public financial opinion, applied intense media harassment seeking to affect Pdvsa's international credibility from different angles.

In the manipulated and hamponil financial market, more aesthetic capital matters than economic capital. What is said about you defines how much you have, not how much you actually have. Every time Procter & Gamble pulls out a new shampoo, it increases its profits without the first bottle reaching the shelf and someone can buy it.

With both sides advancing orchestrately and seamlessly, the Conoco Phillips oil corporation filed a lawsuit with PDVSA in Delaware within a few days of closing the bond swap, which it described as fraudulent for allegedly wanting to avoid the inflated payment of compensation for nationalization.

Pdvsa was subjected to a brutal financial, business and media hijacking throughout the operation. Still, while Ramos Allup had its candles that failed the swap, the operation was successful and the economic heart of Venezuela alleviates its financial situation in the short term.

When the best scenario is the worst

The bond swap is not an isolated strategy to improve the financial situation of PDVSA and the country, but is complementary to the efforts made by Venezuela and OPEC countries, together with Russia and other leading players in the energy market, to stabilize Oil prices around $ 60 and $ 70 per barrel.

Even the anti-Chavez economic opinion makers most consulted by the local media, reflect that if the price were to stabilize in that band in the short term, added to what saved by the bond swap, the country would close almost all its deficit of dollars - necessary to cover imports and stabilize the exchange rate - in addition to facing less vulnerable conditions in its medium-term debt payments.

A positive economic scenario for Venezuela is proportionally negative for the financial elite.

New wave of aggression

In this sense, the success of the operation and the possibility of an agreement to stabilize oil prices will crystallize, activating a new - much more aggressive - stage of harassment and financial siege against PDVSA.

The Crystallex company, of Canadian origin, sued Venezuela for the same unreason and in the same court as Conoco Phillips yesterday, a maneuver that adds to a supposed assessment of embargo to the state oil company for 11 billion dollars that would be making US federal prosecutors for alleged corruption, according to Bloomberg.

Not only did Bloomberg sell the scoop as the largest oil embargo in recent history, it also claimed that such money would be returned to the country during the management of an anti-Chavez government.

This first media amague maintains features similar to the "Lava Jato" case in Petrobras, where the media's veil of corruption was used as a mechanism for foreign intervention in Brazil. The financial and media conditions that brought Dilma Rousseff's mandate to fruition come from that international maneuver.

It is worth remembering that just as PDVSA is sued by oil corporations, Petrobras also received judicial attacks from global banks - Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, etc. - under the alleged fear of not having canceled their loans to the company. Two operations apparently cut by the same ax.

The axis of the conflict moves to the financial front

The plan to shoot the economic heart of Venezuela is political. Venezuela has just canceled the interest on the bonds that were not exchanged and the rest of its outstanding payments. Even so, Venezuela's country risk, prepared by a financial corporation - in a situation of imminent bankruptcy - like Deutsche Bank, remains higher than countries that hold a bad debt, such as the United States or Spain. It remains unchanged.

The conflict moves to the financial front

The MUD is only an intermediary of these great business interests that are battering their hands at the thought of plundering the country again. We do not really face them.

The financial assaults, carried out by business actors with influence on US judicial institutions - Treasury and Justice Department, specifically - are increasing and have their own plan: to stifle financially Venezuela in the medium term to avoid any sign of Economic and political recovery of chavismo.

They throw the rest trying to close the conflict in their favor with a shot of grace by way of the international financial blow, built from judicial records led by oil corporations, media harassment and selective default ratings.

The strangulation tactic against PDVSA, activated from each of these fronts, aims to expand the financial siege against the country to reduce its economic margin of maneuver and increase the difficulties of the population in their daily life, affecting the financial positioning Of the company so that it sees its recovery complicated.

And the deepening of this maneuver does not depend on external state actors or internal actors, but on the financial elite and the application of their tools - risk ratings, judicial demands, etc. - to intervene in Venezuela through the financial route, as well as Try it against Russia and China.

Dialogue as a measure for the stabilization of the internal political conflict and its broad international support, the recurrent mistakes of the MUD and the incipient economic normalization, move the axis of the conflict towards the financial front. Step by step, action after action, however selective or collateral it is, is building a story and a functional operating framework to hit us financially directly to the heart.

Directly affecting the ordinary Venezuelan, putting his hand in his pocket and in his stomach, no matter what the MUD or Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might think, stands as a fundamental and strategic goal for the financial elite to seek the Longed for implosion of the country.

That is the enemy that we face: global economic powers with a portfolio of weapons of different caliber to stifle a country that seeks to overcome great adversities. This is also foreign intervention, though no one names it. The real enemy points his missiles at the heart.

By: William Serafino

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