Venezuela the most corrupt country in Latin America, TI says

[ChangoLoa]

Venezuela is one of the world's most corrupt countries and the worst in Latin America after being ranked 162nd. By contrast, Chile and Uruguay are considered role models, since both are ranked 25th, followed by Costa Rica (43rd) and Cuba (61st), according to the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), released by Transparency International on Tuesday.

New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore top the list of the most transparent countries in the world according to the report, which measures the perceived level of public-sector corruption in 180 countries and is based on 13 different expert and business surveys conducted by 10 independent organizations.

Since 1955, the global civil society organization publishes annually an index of perception of corruption ranging from a score of "10," for a country perceived as "transparent," to "0" for one seen as "corrupt," AFP reported. Venezuela scored 1.9.

The NGO stressed the need to do more to fight corruption at a time when governments seek to revive the economy by injecting a huge volume of public sector capital on programs to boost economic growth.

Link
http://english.eluniversal.com/2009/11/17/en_pol_esp_venezuela-the-most-c_17A3066931.shtml

[Braulio]

1. This is corpo-fascist devil nazi press statement

You are foolish, my friend, believing this universal which everybody knows is owned by a guy whose soul is owned by the Devil itself, and is allied with Bush.

Venezuela isn't corrupt, that's a capitalist term used to insult those whose lives are devoted to the welfare of the people and whose motto, as the French says, is "Remplissez vos poches première".

[ChangoLoa]

2. Yes I should have noticed the guy had devil horns on his head...

Heretic!

[Downwinder]

3. or a basis of comparison, where do they rank the USA? n/t

[ChangoLoa]

4. 19th I think

[Downwinder]

5. A 19th ranking for the US brings validity of the whole report into question. n/t

[Peace Patriot]

6. 'Transparency International" is funded by Exxon Mobil, Shell, the US and UK governments

and anti-Chavez entities, and its office in Venezuela is staffed by the rightwing opposition to the Chavez government. They have published outright, deliberate LIES about the Chavez government's management of Venezuela's oil industry.

See Comment #15 (and the other comments) here, at Changoloa's duplicate post in LBN:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4150008
original: http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/seeing-through-transparency-international/
followup to the original: http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/transparency_internationals_wall_of_silence_01676.html

Changoloa was informed of these facts about 'Transparency International' in the LBN thread but has failed to mention them in this thread. TI is a completely discredited source--something that the corpo-fascist 'news' monopolies that promote TI's bullshit will never tell you. Nor will Changoloa, whose flood of anti-Chavez posts from corpo-fascist 'news' sources is listed by EFerrari at the above LBN thread.

See for yourself what Changoloa's views are, and what kind of an agenda he/she is pursuing at DU.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Great thread. Thanks for posting the link. Well worth examining. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

8. Reposting the piece you posted in LBN: Seeing through Transparency International

Seeing through Transparency InternationalPledged to fight corruption worldwide, the NGO is in danger of revealing its own political agenda in a recent report on Venezuela


Calvin Tucker guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 May 2008 17.00 BST Article historyThe credibility of Transparency International, a global "non-partisan" organisation which "promotes transparency in elections, in public administration, in procurement and in business", is on the line. Their latest report on Venezuela, which was produced after months of research, is factually inaccurate in almost every respect. TI say that they "stand by their report" and stand by the person who compiled the data, an anti-Chávez activist who backed the 2002 military coup against democracy.

The full report, dated April 28 2008 and titled Promoting Revenue Transparency examined the published accounts of oil companies in 42 different countries, and ranked them according to whether they were of high, medium or low transparency. Venezuela's state-owned oil firm PDVSA was given the lowest possible ranking. Transparency International say that "comprehensive corporate reporting diminishes the opportunities for corrupt officials to extort funds".

PDVSA was directly accused of failing to disclose basic financial information such as their revenues and how much royalties they paid, and of not producing properly audited accounts. The international corporate media considers TI to be a reliable source, despite the fact that almost all their funding comes from western governments and big business. The British government is one of the major donors, contributing £1 million in 2007. Other donors include the US government, Shell and Exxon Mobil. Unsurprisingly, TI's damning report was seized upon by rightwing newspapers and websites and used as another stick with which to beat Venezuela's socialist president, Hugo Chávez.

When Dan Burnett, a New York-based blogger who runs the popular Oil Wars website, read the TI report, he almost choked on his cornflakes. Burnett had been analysing PDVSA's accounts for several years, and regularly writes about the financial information that TI claims does not exist.

I checked the PDVSA website. Burnett was right to be astonished. On page 127 of their financial statement it says that revenue for 2007 was $96.242bn, and that they paid $21.9bn in royalties. On page 148, PDVSA's auditors state that the accounts were prepared in accordance with international accounting standards. Further research showed that PDVSA's financial statements are also published in hard copy, and are widely reported in the domestic media, both in newspapers and on television.

I was perplexed. How could Transparency International, which claims that its report was subject to a rigorous "quality control regime" and had been checked for accuracy by "industry experts", have got it so wrong? I called them and asked.

A spokesperson explained that their report was published two weeks before PDVSA submitted their 2007 accounts on May 12 2008. This explanation implied that TI are unfamiliar with basic financial reporting procedures. Before company accounts can be submitted, the data has to be collated, analysed and audited. It is normal for this process to take several weeks or months. For example, Transparency International's own audited financial report for 2007 is not yet publicly available on their website.

However, TI's explanation for their inaccurate report on PDVSA contained a much more serious problem. It was wrong. The March 29 edition of El Universal, a major opposition newspaper, featured a report on PDVSA's financial statement, together with a photograph of PDVSA's president, Rafael Ramirez, holding up a copy of the 2007 report and accounts. The information that TI claimed was being withheld by PDVSA, was published four weeks before they made their allegations. Armed with this additional information, I attempted to contact TI's press spokesperson again for a comment. My calls were not returned.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/22/seeingthroughtransparencyin

Thanks, Peace Patriot.

[Braulio]

10. However, Venezuela remains a very corrupt place

This from a socilalist commie type website, you can read it and see it has all of the credentials you want, they're redder than Trotsky:

"The revolutionary process is inhibited by the state bureaucracy itself, as Chávez himself often says. Leftist militants speak of a “Bolivarian bourgeoisie” clustered around PDVSA, the heads of government ministries, state governors, mayors, and “pro-revolutionary” business types. The recent sale of PDVSA bonds gives some idea of how this stratum consolidates itself in class terms. An anti-Chávez business analyst claims that a recent $7.5 billion PDVSA bond issue attracted bids worth $15 billion. This, he claimed, allowed a relatively small number of people close to the government to purchase the bonds at list price through a limited number of institutions, and then quickly resell the bonds for a much higher price, netting $780 million, a figure that is 20 percent higher than Venezuela’s total financial profits for the 2004–06 period.92 Even if these estimates are inflated by opposition figures, there’s no doubt that the enormous amounts of money flowing in and out of PDVSA inevitably binds company management and sections of the government closely to capital, however hostile individual capitalists may be to the Bolivarian project."

www.isreview.org/issues/54/venezuela.shtml

-----------------------------------------------------
This is from the NY Times about the corruption within the Chavez family itself:

"billboards and posters throughout Sabaneta show Mr. Chávez embracing his younger brother Aníbal, Sabaneta’s mayor, and his father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, the governor of Barinas, the surrounding state. Such reminders of the power amassed by Mr. Chávez’s family have been ubiquitous here since he ascended to the presidency eight years ago.

... the family’s widening political clout has been increasingly scrutinized as critics call attention to abuses of power and corruption charges throughout the institutions now controlled by Mr. Chávez, including the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and the federal bureaucracy. Revelations of corruption under his family’s watch in Barinas and accusations of nepotism have dogged Mr. Chávez .....

www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/americas/18venez.html?_r=1

------------

This is from the world bank, it's a fairly long report, enjoy it.

blogs.worldbank.org/governance/global-corruption-barometer-2009-peoples-experience-and-perception-about-corruption

[Peace Patriot]

12. The "redder than Trotsky" site is talking about class warfare within the Revolution,

not about corruption. Is it corrupt to make a profit? Is it illegal? To a communist, it would be--even if it is not technically corrupt or illegal. But Venezuela is NOT a communist state. It has a mixed socialist/capitalist economy, in which profiting is okay. Did they break Venezuelan laws? Did they bend them? I don't know, but I certainly would never trust "an anti-Chávez business analyst" on ANY facts of the situation, or analysis--as this leftist site seems to be doing.

As for the New York Slimes and the World Tank, the Slimes promote congenital liar Simon Romero as a credible journalist and as the Slimes' chosen viewpoint on Latin America. He has about as much believability as Judith Miller. And the World Tank helped tank the world economy--after ripping into Latin America, over the previous decade, like the frenzied sharks they are. I don't believe anything either of their entities have to say about any Latin American issue. Period. End of story.

Venezuela may have its problems with corruption. The US, the New York Slimes and the World Tank are much, much, MUCH more corrupt than Venezuelans could even dream about. And "Transparency International" has zip to say about that--about the theft of BILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars from Latin America's poor, by US-based and other global corporate predators, and now from the poor of the U.S. as well, including TRILLIONS of dollars in crippling debt unto the 7th generation. Outright fucking theft--by war profiteers and the super-rich.

This apparently is the latest psyops-disinformation 'meme' from the CIA--that Venezuela "is the most corrupt country in Latin America."

Give me a break.

And I haven't even mentioned Colombia--the most corrupt country in the history of civilization, fueled by $6 BILLION in US taxpayer military booty--or Peru (becoming Colombia). If you could take all of the corruption in Venezuela and turn it into a biological entity, it wouldn't amount to a flea in Colombia's elephant ear. And compared to the herd of elephants in the US, it just disappears entirely.

"Transparency International" is flogging a FLEA while a herd of rogue elephants runs away with all the wealth of the world!

[Braulio]

13. i suggest you talk to real Venezuelans

My Venezuelan friends corruption is so bad, the standard mode is to carry cash when visiting a government office.

[ChangoLoa]

14. The last time I had a car accident in Caracas

(it was the fault of the other driver, who was drunk and recognized it.)

The cops told me to come down to the police station with them and, there, they said that if I wanted them to sign the papers for the insurance, I had to pay the equivt. of 50 $ to bribe them. I was lucky, because my car is a cheap one and they could see that I wasn't rich at all. "Cuanto hay pa' eso, profe?"

[ChangoLoa]

15. the PDVSA bonds allow you to buy $ at 1/2-1/3 of the price too

After that, you just need to close the circuit in the black market and get 2-3 times more money than the amount you put at the beginning.

[Judi Lynn]

9. "Transparency" group debunked over right-wing ties

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
"Transparency" group debunked over right-wing ties

If you come across any report put out by Transparency International, it's as good as a paper airplane or toilet tissue.

TI claims to be an organization to fight government corruption around the world. Ironically, the group's own lack of transparency and attempts to manipulate coverage of itself discredit its claim.

When someone noticed that the Wikipedia entry about TI was virtually identical to the group's own description of itself on its website, a red flag went up. When others attempted to correct this, however, suspicious commenters accused these updates of "smearing" TI.

Although Transparency International claims to oppose corruption, the group was funded by Enron, an energy giant that was the focus of a major accounting scandal in the early 2000s. It was also funded by Boeing while one of Boeing's top execs was imprisoned for corrupt activities.

TI also threatened to sue a German blogger in 2006 unless she removed a blog entry that criticized the group.

TI's Venezuelan bureau is staffed by operatives tied to organizers of a failed right-wing coup against democratically elected President Hugo Chavez. One of these staffers worked for a right-wing think tank that was funded by the Bush regime using American taxpayer dollars. Several personnel from TI's Bosnian branch have been accused of racketeering.

Meanwhile, TI refused to expose corruption in the U.S. government under Bush. TI's laughable Corruption Perceptions Index gave high marks to the Bush regime and has given a very high ranking to the totalitarian dictatorship in Singapore, despite widespread public corruption there.

Even though TI's idiotic blubberings don't square with the facts, the media machine still doesn't seem to have caught on.

http://onlinelunchpail.blogspot.com/2009/11/transparency-group-debunked-over-right.html

[Braulio]

11. But Venezuela remains incredibly corrupt

In Venezuela, nothing happens unless payments are made to government officials. The police are corrupt, customs officials are corrupt, officials issuing building permits are extremely corrupt, officials who issue passports and government IDs demand payments, you name it. And this excludes the very high level corruption taking place in PDVSA and other state enterprises, where millions if not billions are being syphoned issuing no-bid contracts to "friendly" foreign corporations.