Hugo Chávez cracks down on allies
“BEING rich is bad,” Hugo Chávez is wont to remark. But in the decade in which he has been Venezuela’s president, some people with close ties to his regime have made fortunes. Now he seems to have lost patience with them. Over the past fortnight the government has shut down seven small banks and an insurance company and arrested several of their owners, accusing them of fraud and mismanagement. The president says this is part of a drive to root out corruption. Yet the scandal would seem to lead to the upper echelons of his government.
Mr Chávez has nationalised many other businesses, so the takeovers at first caused mild panic in financial markets. But the banks involved account for less than 10% of total deposits. Mr Chávez assured the big private banks that they were not incompatible with his ideology of “21st-century socialism”.
Those now in disgrace were behind a string of bank takeovers. They were among the most prominent of the “Boligarchs”, as wags dub those who have enriched themselves from Mr Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution” (named for Simón Bolívar, South America’s independence leader). One of those arrested, Arné Chacón, explained in a newspaper interview in 2005 that
more info:
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=894662&story_id=15066082
