VHeadline Venezuela News reports: A news blackout has been ordered at both the Environment Ministry (MinAmb) and the Basic Industries & Mining (Mibam) Ministry after yesterday's breaking news, published in the regional newspaper El Expreso, that MinAmb Vice Minister Merly Garcia had been "formally dismissed" from office after a late-Thursday executive meeting at which a series of complaints were raised by members of the Bolivar State Legislative Council and Venezuela's Council for Ecological Investigations (CIEV).Mibam Minister and Venezuelan Guayana Corporation (CVG) president & CEO, Rodolfo Sanz is said to be "hopping mad" over the weekend in-house disclosures leaked to El Expreso reporter Ediberto Arasme and published in Sunday editions of his newspaper.
- The situation is more complicated because Ms. Garcia has been a leading light in efforts at the Environment Ministry to cull traditional corrupt practices which had led to the illegal enrichment of a number of national and regional officials.
Guardedly confidential sources at both MinAmb and Mibam this morning, however, tend to believe that the "formal dismissal" of Merly Garcia is "in the process of being revoked" after Sanz' direct intervention with President Hugo Chavez Frias over the weekend to have Minister Yubiri Ortega de Carrizales' "somewhat precipitated" decision reversed.
The "official" nature of the alleged dismissal came only after the involvement of Minister Ortega's husband, Vice President Ramon Carrizales who was recently given authority to sack vice ministers at his own discretion.
The whole debacle quaintly illustrates the state of conflict between the Ministry of the Environment (MinAmb) and the Basic Industries & Mining Ministry (Mibam), and direct confrontations between Ortega de Carrizales and Rodolfo Sanz where the latter has considerably more weight in political-economic decisions because of his presidency of the state-owned heavy industry conglomerate CVG and the unwillingness of any other member of Chavez' Cabinet to take over what has been seen as an executive "suicide seat"!
Ortega de Carrizalez has been out-gunned in a number of decisions by Sanz, including a reversal of her unilateral decision that there should be no further open-cast mining in Venezuela ... to which Sanz reacted angrily in the knowledge that such an imposition would basically paralyze feeds stock supplies to all of the CVG's industries as well as further paralyzing progress towards an equitable solution to the Las Cristinas and Las Brisas del Cuyuni gold mines, among others.
The Vice President's wife was further routed when the Russian Agapov group's Rusoro Mining took over Idaho-based Hecla's virtually abandoned workings at El Callao and entered into a socialist 'empresa mixta' (mixed enterprise) 50/50 partnership with the CVG to reactivate the La Camorra and Isidora mines, and to settle huge union claims that had been abandoned by Hecla when it left Venezuela for good some months back.
Whichever way, it appears that Vice Minister Merly Garcia's position may be more secure at the Ministry than was believed in the weekend media report, while Ortega de Carrizales' star is definitely dwindling with the immediate prospect of her being replaced by Jesus Arnoldo Perez, a former Environment Minister (1999-2000) who became Foreign Minister (2004) and then Ambassador to Paris-France.
Allegations of illegalities related to the unauthorized issuance of environmental permits resulting in massive ecological destruction in the El Tigre and the La Broma sectors of the Cedeno municipality in southern Bolivar State are, however, being leveled by National Guard (GN) Rural Command 89 officers against the Environment Ministry's administrative executive for Area 7 Upata, Edgardo Russo, who is said to have illegally authorized the deforestation of huge areas of protected tree species in the Imataca rain forest, including 569,908 cubic meters of lumber at Rancho Quemao and 6,000 cubic meters at El Jobo in Roscio municipality.
VHeadline Venezuela News
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