{"id":17884,"date":"2020-11-27T06:10:33","date_gmt":"2020-11-27T11:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=17884"},"modified":"2020-11-27T06:12:35","modified_gmt":"2020-11-27T11:12:35","slug":"citgo-6-us-oil-executives-convicted-of-corruption-in-venezuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2020\/11\/27\/citgo-6-us-oil-executives-convicted-of-corruption-in-venezuela\/","title":{"rendered":"Citgo 6: US oil executives convicted of corruption in Venezuela"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Six US oil executives have been jailed after being found guilty of corruption by a court in Venezuela.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The men all worked for Citgo, a US refining company owned by Venezuela’s state oil firm, and were arrested in the capital Caracas three years ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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They all denied wrongdoing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Citgo’s former president, Jose Pereira, was sentenced to over 13 years in prison and given a $2m (\u00a31.5m) fine. The others received sentences of between eight and 10 years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The others, who were all vice-presidents of the company at the time, have been named as Jose Luis Zambrano, Alirio Jose Zambrano, Jorge Toledo, Tomeu Vadell and Gustavo Cardenas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the group’s lawyers told Reuters news agency that the men planned to appeal and described them as “political prisoners”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“The evidence for the crimes they are accused of was not there, it did not even mention the six of them,” lawyer Maria Alejandra said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The group, all US citizens or permanent residents, was arrested in November 2017 after being called to Caracas for a meeting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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According to Human Rights Watch, the group was accused of signing a deal that was “unfavourable” for Venezuela’s state oil firm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Their arrests marked the beginning of\u00a0a sweeping anti-corruption operation in Venezuela<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Critics of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro said the move was part of a political purge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Venezuela’s oil industry is key for the government as it accounts for about 95% of the country’s export earnings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Last year,\u00a0the US introduced sanctions against the country’s state-owned oil firm PDVSA<\/a>\u00a0after recognising opposition leader Juan Guaid\u00f3 as interim president.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Six US oil executives have been jailed after being found guilty of corruption by a court in Venezuela. The men all worked for Citgo, a US refining company owned by Venezuela’s state oil firm, and […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2,3,6],"tags":[6360,7469,948,1791,6359,7468,7467,1902],"class_list":{"0":"post-17884","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-human-rights","8":"category-news","9":"category-usa","10":"category-world","11":"tag-caracas","12":"tag-citgo","13":"tag-corruption","14":"tag-human-rights-watch","15":"tag-nicolas-maduro","16":"tag-oil-and-gas-industry","17":"tag-pdvsa","18":"tag-venezuela","19":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17886,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17884\/revisions\/17886"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}