Thursday, May 04, 2006

Bolivia: Venezuelan Auditors... Huh???? FUERA PDVSA

This is a bad joke.

I wrote before about how Evo Morales' government had brought in Venezuelan auditors to conduct an audit of the troubled national Airline, Lloyd Aereo Boliviano, angering Bolivian employees.

Well, according to this article in the New York Times, Venezuelan auditors from PDVSA are supposedly going to be helping in the audit of the newly nationalized foreign oil companies.


As a first step, auditors from PetrĂ³leos de Venezuela, that nation's oil giant, visited three foreign companies in Bolivia and announced that they would be involved in the audits, an executive of one company said.

The Venezuelan company is also providing technical help to Bolivian authorities and is to sign a contract to build a gas separation plant.

Go home and clean up your messes there!!! PDVSA is a poster child for massive corruption and disfunctionality in state agencies. How qualified and credible can these auditors be, when tens of millions of dollars (at least) have completely disappeared from company books??? In the greater scheme of things, who needs advice from a company that despite an oil boom windfall, squanders money like crazy, and can not even keep up with its supply contracts keep up production.

How fair is it??? It is a huge conflict of interest, since PVDSA is a competitor of these same firms, (and sometimes even a partner). Employees of an oil company -which stands to gain- should not be doing audits of the holdings of its competitors on behalf of a national government.

PDVSA is a corrupt, politicized, and inneficient company. Chavez laid off thousands of its most competent and well-trained employees replacing them with political hacks and cronies. It lacks the means to fairly audit, or for that manner advise any other oil company. They have repeatedly failed to account to the Venezuelan people about where their oil wealth is being squandered, maybe they should stay at home and work on that.

Then again, maybe PDVSA auditors should travel out of Venezuela, not to Bolivia though, they should instead come here to Miami to audit the real estate holdings of high PDVSA officials and their families, most of it bought quite recently.

1 comment:

Alvaro Ruiz-Navajas said...

Nice post, Boli-Nica! Thanks for leaving a comment in my blog. I remember I visited yours a long time ago (before I started blogging) and when I started mine, I just lost the address for my blog roll. Well, there you are now. Thanks again. This post is right on the spot.