Siemens AG is a German multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Munich and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe with branch offices abroad.
Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. is the Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company. It has activities in exploration, production, refining and exporting oil as well as exploration and production of natural gas. Since its founding on 1 January 1976 with the nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry, PDVSA has dominated the oil industry of Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter.
IEASA, in full Integración Energética Sociedad Anónima and previously known as ENARSA, is a state owned company in Argentina. It is engaged in the exploitation of petroleum and natural gas, and the production, industrialization, transport and trade of these and of electricity.
Rafael Darío Ramírez Carreño is a Venezuelan engineer, politician, and diplomat. He joined the board of Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company PDVSA in 2002 and served as company president from 2004 to 2014. He also served as Venezuela's Minister of Energy from 2002 to 2014. He was the longest-serving cabinet member under President Hugo Chávez. In 2014, he briefly served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and then subsequently served as Venezuela's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. Ramirez was fired as UN representative by Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro the evening of November 28, 2017. He confirmed he had "resigned" at the request of Maduro on December 4, 2017
The Orinoco Belt is a territory in the southern strip of the eastern Orinoco River Basin in Venezuela which overlies the world's largest deposits of petroleum. Its local Spanish name is Faja Petrolífera del Orinoco.
Novonor, previously Odebrecht S.A. is a Brazilian conglomerate, headquartered in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, consisting of diversified businesses in the fields of engineering, construction, chemicals and petrochemicals. The company was founded in 1944 in Salvador, Bahia by Norberto Odebrecht, and is now present in the regions of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Its leading company is Norberto Odebrecht Construtora.
Últimas Noticias is a daily newspaper in Venezuela, British-owned and characterized by The Guardian as a "pro-Maduro tabloid".
The Comisión Federal de Electricidad is the state-owned electric utility of Mexico, widely known as CFE. It is the country's dominant electric company, and the country's second most powerful state-owned company after Pemex. The Mexican constitution states that the government is responsible for the control and development of the national electric industry, and CFE carries out this mission. The company's slogan is "Una empresa de clase mundial".
The Maletinazo, Valijagate, or suitcase scandal was a 2007 scandal involving Venezuela and Argentina, souring friendship between the countries.
Bolibourgeoisie or Bolichicos are terms describing the new bourgeois created by the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez and Chavismo, made up of people who became rich under the Chávez administration. The term was coined by journalist Juan Carlos Zapata to "define the oligarchy that has developed under the protection of the Chávez government".
The level of corruption in Venezuela is high by world standards and is prevalent throughout many levels of Venezuelan society. Discovery of oil in Venezuela in the early 20th century has worsened political corruption. The large amount of corruption and mismanagement in the country has resulted in severe economic difficulties, part of the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela. Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perception Index ranks the country in 173rd place out of 180 countries.
César Batiz is a Venezuelan investigative journalist. He previously worked with the country's largest newspaper, Últimas Noticias, and is currently the director of Poderopedia and El Pitazo. In many of his writings, he has taken on issues of corruption that have put him at odds with the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López is a Venezuelan businessman who is Chairman and CEO of Derwick Associates, an engineering, procurement and construction company. He is the leader of the international investment group O'Hara Administration, and a director of Pacific Exploration & Production Corporation, a publicly held Canadian company and a leading explorer and producer of natural gas and crude oil which operates in various Latin American countries. Betancourt controls 19.95% of Pacific Exploration & Production. He is also president of Hawkers, a Spanish sunglasses company.
SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. is a Canadian company based in Montreal that provides engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) services to various industries, including mining and metallurgy, oil and gas, environment and water, infrastructure, and clean power. SNC-Lavalin is the largest construction company, by revenue, in Canada, as of 2018.
Operation Car Wash was a criminal investigation by the Federal Police of Brazil, Curitiba Branch. It began in March 2014 and was initially headed by investigative judge Sergio Moro, and in 2019 by Judge Luiz Antônio Bonat. It has resulted in more than a thousand warrants of various types. According to the Operation Car Wash task force, investigations implicate administrative members of the state-owned oil company Petrobras, politicians from Brazil's largest parties, presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, state governors, and businessmen from large Brazilian companies. The Federal Police consider it the largest corruption investigation in the country's history.
Nationwide recurring electrical blackouts in Venezuela began in March 2019. Experts and state-run Corpoelec sources attribute the electricity shortages to lack of maintenance and to a lack of technical expertise in the country resulting from a brain drain; Nicolás Maduro's administration attributes them to sabotage. Since March, various nationwide blackouts occurred in the country.
Venezuela has experienced a marked deficit in the generation of electrical energy. The immediate cause of the crisis was a prolonged drought that caused the water in the reservoir of the Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant to reach very low levels. This occurred during a new occurrence of the El Niño climate phenomenon, which began to develop since July 2009. Although various measures were taken to overcome the crisis, one of the most controversial was the implementation of a program of electrical rationing throughout the country, except in the capital Caracas, which was ultimately officially suspended in June 2010, due to the recovery of reservoirs due to the rains, and not to interrupt the transmission of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Although on 29 August of that year the Guri Dam reservoir reached its optimum level of operation, power cuts have continued to occur in the interior of the country, although with less frequency and duration, this time driven by failures in other parts of the system. The situation of "electrical emergency" decreed by the government on 21 December 2009 was suspended on 30 November 2010; however, on 14 May 2011, after the country experienced two national blackouts, the government of Hugo Chávez announced a temporary rationing plan and acknowledged that the electricity system continued to face "generation weaknesses" that they did not expect to surpass until end the year.
During the crisis in Venezuela, governments of the United States, the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Panama and Switzerland applied individual sanctions against people associated with the administration of Nicolás Maduro. The sanctions were in response to repression during the 2014 Venezuelan protests and the 2017 Venezuelan protests, and activities during the 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election and the 2018 Venezuelan presidential election. Sanctions were placed on current and former government officials, including members of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) and the 2017 Constituent National Assembly (ANC), members of the military and security forces, and private individuals accused of being involved in human rights abuses, corruption, degradation in the rule of law and repression of democracy.
El Pitazo is an independent Venezuelan multimedia franchise. The name "pitazo" refers to whistleblowing. It is part of the Latin American media Rebel Alliance, with Tal Cual and Runrunes. They also collaborate with NGOs to be more informed on diverse groups of people in the nation. According to El País, the aims of El Pitazo are to bring news to the most isolated areas. The company director is César Batiz.
Juan Carlos Márquez Cabrera was an executive director of the Venezuelan state-run oil company PDVSA. He was involved in investigations of the Morodo Case in Spain in 2019, before mysteriously dying.
