Caracas, Venezuela – Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA and Spain’s Repsol YPF agreed to create a joint venture for the exploitation of an oil field after the Spanish firm bought Exxon Mobil’s participation in the project.
PDVSA announced Friday that it had reached an agreement with Repsol YPF to develop the Quiamare-La Ceiba field in the eastern state of Anzoategui.
“Repsol YPF, which owned 75 percent of the shares of the consortium that handled operations, bought up the remaining 25 percent from Exxon Mobil,” PDVSA said in a communique.
The Quiamare-La Ceiba field produces 15,000 barrels of crude per day.
The 22 multinational oil companies operating in oil-rich Venezuela will have to transition the 32 working agreements they signed with PDVSA in the decade of the 1990s toward a “mixed company” mode in which the state-owned firm will hold at least 60 percent of the shares.
On Thursday, Venezuela’s tax agency Seniat demanded that Repsol YPF pay $113.4 million for delinquent taxes corresponding to the period 2001-2004.
Payment of some $3 billion in back taxes is one of the demands the Venezuelan government has made to the 22 multinationals operating in the country under the new mixed-company scheme.
Venezuela’s tax collection chief has threatened to shut down the foreign oil companies that owe taxes until they pay up.
“I am going to shut off the taps of those oil companies until they pay up, because they want to keep on selling oil without paying,” said Jose Vielma Mora in September. He could well “shut down the administrative part and then the operational part” of the delinquent transnationals, Vielma warned.
The tax chief said President Hugo Chavez does not want transnational oil companies to leave Venezuela, “but we do want them to pay taxes.” Venezuela is the world’s fifth top exporter of crude and possesses the eighth largest reserve of hydrocarbons on the planet.
