Ten years ago, Wilmer Ruperti was just another ambitious businessman. Now, as Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez marks a decade in power, Mr Ruperti is a billionaire shipping tycoon and one of the richest men in the country.
Many of Mr Ruperti’s peers claim that his success is owed to more than his business acumen. He has been branded a quintessential “boligarch”, one of a new breed of Venezuelan business magnates. They are said to enjoy close relations with Mr Chávez’s “Bolivarian” government – named after Simón Bolivar, South America’s 19th century independence hero.
Mr Ruperti says he has been castigated for his role in breaking the infamous oil industry shutdown in 2002-03, which was engineered by Mr Chávez’s opponents, many of them business leaders, who were trying to topple his government.
After making oil tankers available to the government – thereby enabling the president to survive the opposition’s attempt to cut off his key revenue source, oil exports – Mr Ruperti was well positioned to win future shipping contracts with the state oil company, PDVSA, at a time when others were excluded.
“It was a big decision. Normally I don’t gamble like that,” says Mr Ruperti, who admits it paid off. “But really I was just complying with my contract.”
Daniel Hellinger, a historian and political scientist specialising in Venezuela, says previous oil booms spawned new business elites. “It is history repeating itself,” he says.
He distinguishes two groups of boligarchs: members of the old order who “changed their colours at the right time” and a new group who “made smart decisions, built government connections, were very shrewd and just knew how to work the system”.
But those business leaders who backed the oil strike, and a botched coup d’état in 2002, have suffered. The most high profile casualty is RCTV, formerly Venezuela’s most popular television channel. Its public broadcasting licence was revoked last year, due partly to Mr Chávez’s accusations that it was behind the putsch.
The difference between the old and new elites, say observers, is that the new eschews politics. “Evidently the government is more comfortable working with people that are not trying to overthrow it,” says Arturo Sarmiento, who has imported whisky and traded oil and now runs Telecaribe, a regional television channel.
Alberto Cudemus, a prominent businessman involved in pork farming who enjoys good relations with the government, says: “Many of the traditional business people simply haven’t understood that there has been a huge change here . . . Businesses have to get back to what we are supposed to be doing: investing, generating employment, improving technology and producing goods and services. It’s not our job to make laws.”
Indeed, although Mr Chávez calls his creed “21st century socialism”, some capitalists – mainly those in commodities, those exposed to Venezuela’s consumer spending boom and those benefiting from economic distortions – have been flourishing .
For some companies, Venezuela is the most profitable country in the region. “Companies can – and do – make serious money in Venezuela,” says Daniel Linsker, an analyst at Control Risks, which advises several large international companies operating in Venezuela. “That doesn’t mean it is not challenging, that private companies do not face a high degree of uncertainty and even state harassment, or that companies can freely remit their profits,” he adds.
Banks, in particular, have thrived. This is largely due to an exchange rate that has been fixed since 2003 to prevent capital flight owing to fears of instability resulting from Mr Chávez’s impulsive style. But after remaining unchanged against the dollar since then, after years of soaring inflation, it is now heavily overvalued.
This has fomented an active black market that has allowed savvy bankers – particularly those with good government contacts – to make “Russia-like fortunes”, according to one senior local investment banker.
But making a fortune in Venezuela is likely to be much more difficult from now on. The collapse in oil prices means the country’s capitalists, boligarchs or not, face tougher times.
As for Mr Ruperti, he scoffs at the term boligarch. “In Venezuela people make up all kinds of ridiculous stories,” he says. “I have spent all of seven minutes with Chávez.”
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