April 18, 2020
BCV, with the country
The Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV), the country’s largest financial institution, reported that on Thursday the U.S. government ordered Citibank to transfer resources to misappropriate money from accounts belonging to the Venezuelan government.
The BCV reports in a statement that the U.S. Treasury Department instructed Citibank to “transfer resources from an account held by this institute to an account held by the Federal Reserve, consummating a vulgar plundering of financial resources belonging to the Venezuelan bank.”
The main Venezuelan banking institution pointed out that this is another blatant unilateral measure of the U.S. government against Venezuela and stressed that this action is one more chapter in the series of coordinated attacks against the South American nation.
For years now, the White House has been toughening a series of coercive sanctions against Venezuela that impedes its economic and financial development and that have involved the plundering of considerable resources of the Venezuelan State.
The BCV assured that it “will exercise all the actions available to it within the framework of international law and the national legal system, to protect the legitimate rights and interests of the Venezuelan State.”
The bank denounced that the plundering represents “serious acts of transnational organized crime” that has been undertaken directly by the government of Donald Trump, in collusion with extremist deputies of the Venezuelan right.”
The institution charged that this dispossession affects the normal development of the Venezuelan economy, which was already widely impacted by the previous measures of the White House against Venezuela, and which is also more complicated at present in view of the situation generated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is a “vulgar act of plunder” by the U.S. Treasury Department “in complicity” with the National Assembly, which controls the opposition, Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza denounced on Twitter.
On another note, Brazil formally closed its foreign mission in Venezuela yesterday by repatriating its last diplomats and embassy officials with their families.
According to a joint communiqué between the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Defense, a total of 38 people, including diplomats and officials from the embassy and consulates, military attachés and family members were repatriated on a Brazilian Air Force flight that arrived in Brasilia.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau