Rafael Ramírez, the man who managed over a trillion dollars during his tenure as CEO of PDVSA and Minister of Energy in Venezuela, accuses the chavismo of corruption in the granting of oil concessions. In the latest episode of his bizarre narrative, he accused former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of being a representative of the shady operator Alberto Cortina, in order to secure favorable deals from Nicolás Maduro. Nothing that the readers of this site wouldn’t already know. However, Ramírez seems to overlook the concessions granted under his watch, for which the same group of individuals paid $904 million in “bonuses” to PDVSA.
Now, Ramírez is a blogger. He seems to have a lot of free time to write these days. In one of his recent posts, he uses the image of Nicolás Maduro dining at Salt Bae’s restaurant to criticize Maduro’s disastrous management. This is the same Ramírez who showed a complete lack of empathy towards the plight of Venezuelans while dining at Peter Luger in New York City when he was still serving as Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN.
This is the same Ramírez who led PDVSA for 12 years, squandering the largest amount of income in Venezuela’s history. This is also the same Ramírez who continued to submit budget requests to Maduro, allowing rampant corruption and the misappropriation of sovereign funds to carry on as usual. He is the same one who filmed himself threatening workers at a PDVSA meeting to intimidate those opposing the regime’s dictates. The same Ramírez whose direct relatives are neck-deep (thanks to him) in a global bribery scandal that is nearly impossible to quantify. The same Ramírez directly involved in granting no-bid contracts to companies acquiring power plants which Swiss authorities discovered had paid over $160 million in bribes…
Crazy, disturbed, deceived, sociopathic… how can we describe Ramírez’s latest writings? It’s as if his past, his record, and his actions while at the top of the government never happened, as if personal responsibility for the current mess could simply be avoided by throwing accusations at his current enemies. Ramírez is a writer who seems oblivious to the existence and meaning of certain words. Someone should gift him a dictionary, as he now claims to make a living with an “honest” job.