Caracas – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced on Sunday that his government will place a “new extraction tax” on crude oil to increase national revenues from exploitation of the resource by both foreign and domestic firms.
“We’re going to create a new oil tax called the ‘extraction tax.’ The firms who are pumping oil in Venezuela are earning lots of money,” Chavez said on his Sunday radio and television show “Alo Presidente.”
The Venezuelan leader did not specify how big the new tax would be, but he did say that it would generate “several hundred million dollars this year … (and) more than $1 billion dollars” in 2007 for the treasury.
The new tax would be paid by the so-called “mixed firms” in which the state-run PDVSA oil firm has a majority stake.
The leftist populist leader also announced that he would increase from 34 to 50 percent the ISLR income tax on companies exploiting crude oil in the Orinoco Petroleum Belt, which has known reserves of some 235 billion barrels, according to official figures.
The administration will ask the National Assembly, whose 167 members are all government supporters, to modify the Hydrocarbons Law to include the new tax as well as to increase the ISLR.
Chavez said that it was “anti-Chavez infiltrators” who allowed the Hydrocarbons Law, which was put in place in 2001, to include a 34 percent tax on foreign firms operating in the Orinoco Belt while companies pumping crude elsewhere in the country pay 50 percent.
There are 22 mixed firms – including both local and foreign companies – operating in Venezuela in partnership with PDVSA, including Spanish-Argentine Repsol YPF, China National Petroleum, British Petroleum, the U.S. firm Chevron and Brazil’s Petrobras.
Venezuela is a founding member of OPEC and the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter.
Chavez also took advantage of his radio-TV show to lambast Washington for conducting military maneuvers in the Caribbean intended to “terrify” Caracas, and he warned that “the Bolivarian Revolution is not afraid of the empire,” using his habitual term for the United States.
“There are 6,000 Marines in the Caribbean and I don’t know how many aircraft carriers and submarines. … They’re not going to threaten us, they’re not going to scare us, we’re not afraid of the paper empire,” Chavez said.
U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield has denied that Washington’s military maneuvers were intended to intimidate Venezuela.
Various sources have reported that the U.S. military forces participating in the maneuvers include aircraft carriers, more than 100 combat aircraft, a cruiser, a destroyer, a missile frigate and 6,500 Marines. EFE
