The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Madurosaid on Monday that he accepted the resignation of Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami amid a corruption investigation centered on the state oil company PDVSAlocal judges and other government officials.
Maduro did not reveal who will replace El Aissami, 48, until now a powerful political figure who has served as vice president, minister and governor for the past two decades.
The president added that El Aissamiwho held the position of oil minister since 2020, he revealed “his willingness, as he has demonstrated, to provide all the information he manages and support all investigations against these groups of bandits.”
“He has ratified his status as a revolutionary militant,” Maduro said, immediately adding that “I have decided to accept the minister’s resignation.”
Surrounded by the first lady, Cilia Flores, the deputy Diosdado Cabello, second in command of the ruling party, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and the head of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, Maduro said that “we are going to fully cleanse PDVSA (… ) with draconian restructuring measures”, although he did not give details.
In his speech broadcast on official television, Maduro confirmed that among the detainees is a mayor of a town in the center of the country and that according to the president he had relations with a criminal gang, while at least two other prisoners were judges who were selling their sentences to drug traffickers, but did not provide details either. El Aissami, sanctioned in 2017 by the United States for drug trafficking and who was credited with having helped PDVSA circumvent Washington’s sanctions measures, submitted his resignation in a message on his Twitter account without specifying the corruption investigations in the oil company.
Maduro also said that in the first stage of the investigation, which he said began in October, they captured businessmen, senior officials and a deputy linked to the cases of the state oil company.
Earlier, three sources with knowledge of the case told Reuters that Colonel Antonio Pérez Suárez, a former PDVSA vice president of trade and supply, had been detained. Also Colonel Samuel Testamarck, general manager of PDV Marina, the oil company’s maritime subsidiary, was another of those captured, according to two other sources.
The arrests in PDVSA would have been for an investigation into the departure of ships with oil cargoes for export without the payment of due compensation to the company. Other company officials have been suspended from their posts over the same investigation, one of the sources said.
The prosecutor’s office and PDVSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on that case.
Between Friday and Sunday, the Venezuelan Anti-Corruption Police arrested an official, two judges and a mayor. The security body said in a statement broadcast by official television that they had captured the superintendent of crypto assets Joselit Ramírez, and the judges Cristóbal Cornieles and José Márquez García, in addition to Pedro Hernández, mayor of Las Tejerías, an area in the center of the country that late last year it suffered flood damage.
Neither the charges nor the specific cases of corruption in which the detainees would be involved have been officially revealed. These types of operations are rare in the public administration of Venezuela, marked by the opacity of its efforts, according to non-governmental groups such as Transparency International.
Joselit Ramírez, who since 2018 had been in charge of the National Superintendence of Cryptoactive and Related Activities (Sunacrip), in charge of the offer of the petro -the Venezuelan digital currency-, was dismissed and Maduro appointed a board to restructure the portfolio, according to La Gaceta. Official released on Saturday.
Ramírez is reportedly being investigated for cases linked to PDVSA, according to reports from the newspaper Últimas Noticias, which is close to the government.
The arrest of the officials is one of the largest raids since in 2017 the Prosecutor’s Office carried out the capture of executives over several months and charged two former PDVSA presidents.
In 2018, the Public Ministry also requested the capture of oil company officials for administrative irregularities that affected the operations of crude oil upgraders.
kg
