March 4, 2023

By Mircely Guanipa Marianna Parraga

MARACAY/HOUSTON, Jan 4 (Archyde.com) – Operational bottlenecks in a key shipping channel in Venezuela are slowing Chevron’s efforts to load tankers at one of its four joint ventures and bring heavy crude to the United States, three people familiar with said on Wednesday. with the matter. With the aim of encouraging talks between the government of Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition, Washington authorized the last major US company still operating in Venezuela in November to expand production and resume oil exports. But a plan to quickly move heavy oil stored by the Petroboscán joint venture, which Chevron operates in conjunction with state oil company PDVSA, faces delays due to a lack of dredging in the Lake Maracaibo navigation channel, the people said. A dredge is often needed to clear river and lake beds and remove mud, weeds and trash for ships to transit. Shallow waters in the canal caused an unrelated ship carrying scrap metal to run aground in December. Since then, Petroboscán has instructed vessels to limit their draft following loading at the Bajo Grande oil terminal. The navigation channel of Lake Maracaibo, in the northwest of the country, is suitable only for loading ships with a draft of up to 9.8 meters, said one of the people. That means only regarding 250,000 barrels of Boscán heavy crude can move through the channel linking Bajo Grande to the Caribbean Sea at a time. In a sign that Chevron hopes to quickly expand its operations, the oil producer has begun offering positions for contract management and scheduling of Venezuelan shipments. The company is hiring to revive operations that have been largely dormant for years, particularly its marketing and trading divisions, which will handle oil exports for its own refineries in the United States and others. Chevron began preparing to restart operations at its joint ventures in Venezuela last year while filing a license application with the US Treasury Department, following an agreement with PDVSA. The company wants to form a commercial team to market oil from Venezuela and expand its role in the four projects. PDVSA and Chevron did not respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Mircely Guanipa in Maracay and Marianna Parraga in Houston)

Weighted analysis published by Journal National Interest Problems continue to exacerbate in Lebanon, making the situation worse, as the country is witnessing a political stalemate following it failed to elect a new president, while a caretaker government manages the scene in the country.

He stressed that the arrest of Hezbollah’s most prominent financiers in late February may be “commendable”, but it is more like a “side show for the people”, especially since the country “stands on the edge of the abyss”, noting that Lebanon is “almost on the verge of collapse”.

The World Bank ranks the crisis in Lebanon among the worst in the world since 1850, as the lira lost regarding 95 percent of its value, and this was reflected in an increase in fuel and food prices, while several stores stopped pricing their goods, according to an AFP report.

The Romanian authorities were able to arrest Muhammad Ibrahim Bazzi and Talal Shaheen, whose crimes exceed Romania and the United States, and they used to circumvent international sanctions, and they contributed to making millions of dollars for Hezbollah through “commercial activities in Belgium, Gambia, Lebanon and Iraq,” according to the monitoring office. Foreign assets of the US Treasury.

Washington had included Bazzi on the terrorist list since 2018.

The analysis indicates that, as a financier of Hezbollah, Bazzi maintained “relations with the Central Bank of Iran, as well as relations with other designated terrorist organizations.”

He stated that without the donations provided by Iran to Hezbollah, it would not have been able to expand its great political influence, affecting Lebanon’s internal and external policies, not to mention its implementation of operations supported by Tehran in Syria and Yemen and once morest Israel.

Despite the financial restrictions imposed on Hezbollah and Iran during the past two decades, a new method is discovered every once in a while that Tehran and its proxies use to circumvent the sanctions, the latest of which was Israel’s announcement of monitoring gold smuggling operations between Iran and Venezuela, which are carried out by the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards. The profits of these operations are transferred to Hezbollah.

Matthew Levitt, a former US Treasury official and researcher at The Washington Institute, said in a book he authored in 2013 that Hezbollah has been active in establishing a presence in Latin America within the countries of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, where it has supported the establishment of sleeper cells, which have a role in networks. Drug smuggling in order to provide funds for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has established similar transnational criminal networks in Europe, Africa and even the United States.

The analysis confirms that the arrest of Bazzi and Shaheen will not constitute a fatal blow to Hezbollah, as it has a structure that supports its international organizations to ensure the continued flow of funds to it.

Since the end of the term of the Lebanese President, Michel Aoun, at the end of last October, Parliament has failed during the 11 sessions it held to elect a president, amid a political division between a team that supports Hezbollah, the most prominent political and military force in the country, and another that opposes it, amid differences within each team, and the presence of number of freelancers. No party has a parliamentary majority that would enable it to deliver a candidate to the presidency, according to an analysis published by Agence France-Presse.

Since January 19, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri has not set a date for a new election session.

The authorities have so far failed to implement reforms required by the international community to provide support in order to stop the bleeding.

Last April, the International Monetary Fund announced that it had reached a preliminary agreement with Lebanon on an aid plan worth three billion dollars over four years. However, its implementation is linked to the authorities’ commitment to implement prior reforms, including the unification of exchange rates.

This week, the lira crossed the threshold of 90,000 once morest the dollar, at a record rate that indicates the depth of the political and economic crises and the blockage of the horizon for a solution.