venezuela

For the past three/four weeks I’ve noticed a spike in Google searches for corruption-related Venezuelan names and PDVSA. Some of the world’s biggest and best known banks and accounting firms seem all too keen, suddenly, of finding out what’s going in Venezuela. It could well be related to PDVSA’s announcement of a $7 billion bond swap. But it could also be due to some persistent rumours about impending legal cases against PDVSA that could all but obliterate the company’s ability to meet its current international financial obligations, let alone future ones.

"When you're not allowed to think for yourself, when you're not allowed to have, and voice, an opinion, insofar as such opinion is contrary to the diktats of the ruling party, you lose the only thing that makes us human. You become like an object in a meaningless life, and such life is not worth living. So I decided to rebel against that system and I had no fear of dying, for living in such condition was akin to being dead."

Public companies trade on their earnings, management team, and in great part on their name. How the market perceives a company has the most impact on stock price. It follows that multinational corporations apportion considerate amount of resources to PR and brand-reputation protection. Wall Street history is littered with examples of what happens to a stock’s price when a company becomes embroiled in scandals, corporate malfeasance, or fraud.

The BBC reported it as "Police at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport have seized 1.3 tonnes of pure cocaine on board an Air France flight from Venezuela, French officials say." For Venezuela observers this is nothing new. What's surprising about it, is how Venezuela's "CSIRT" is trying to block information about those believed to be responsible. See below.

Wikipedia (handle with care) defines it thus: "SUCRE (Spanish: Sistema Único de Compensación Regional, English: Unified System for Regional Compensation) is a proposed regional currency to be used in commercial exchanges between members of the regional trade bloc Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), which was created as an alternative to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). The SUCRE is intended to replace the US dollar as a medium of exchange in order to decrease US control of Latin American economies and to increase stability of regional markets." A noble endeavor, some will say...