Colombia will seek to buy shares of Monomeros in Venezuela: trade minister

The Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, Germán Umaña, announced that the national government plans to buy all the shares of Monómeros in Venezuela, as part of the program to reactivate commercial relations between the two countries. The announcement was made after President Gustavo Petro and dictator Nicolás Maduro signed the partial scope trade agreement.

“The issue of Monomeros has been discussed with Venezuela and we will have the conditions to make a decision on this. The evaluations are in progress because it is necessary to see what is the status of the Monomers and what investments would be necessary. The Venezuelan government will have to make the corresponding proposals that have not been made,” said Minister Umaña in Radio Blue.

This purchase would be assessed to lessen the blows left by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made fertilizers more expensive worldwide, which is why when buying the company today in the hands of the Venezuelan State, we would seek to be able to produce these agrochemicals in the country and not have to import them. This idea is not new, because in 2022 the Minister of Finance, José Antonio Ocampo, declared that Colombia would be ready to buy the company.

“On the issue of fertilizers, I said that we are ready for anything, even here among us, to buy Monomeros and expand it significantly,” Minister Ocampo said on November 30, 2022 during an event with the coffee growers union in Bogotá. .

Likewise, in August 2022, after Petro’s inauguration as president, he had proposed the takeover of the company to the Venezuelan state, with the intention of acquiring 51% of the company. It is important to mention that dictator Nicolás Maduro regained control of the Monómeros board in September 2022, after spending several years under the influence of opposition figure Juan Guaidó.

On February 16, the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and the head of the Venezuelan regime, Nicolás Maduro, signed, at the Atanasio Girardot Bridge (Tienditas), the Partial Scope Trade Agreement #28 between the two countries, which establishes a deepening of the legal framework which allows the reinforcement of the integration for the commercial development between the two countries.

President Petro warned that relations between the two nations “should never have been closed”. He also said that the signing of the agreement “is one more step in integration that should never have been suspended” and affirmed that the process of improving relations between all Latin American countries must to resume. In passing, he told Maduro that the diplomatic squabbles of the past cannot be repeated.

“It’s not about these bridges being filled with commerce only, but rather that they’re filled with people who can come and go; and I am not talking about big capital which wants to invest from one place to another. I am referring to the small capitals of the people who live there in these houses,” President Petro stressed about the signing of the partial agreement.

For his part, Maduro celebrated the signing of this agreement within the framework of the “meeting” between the brotherly countries and said that the binational relations took “a new dynamic” which covers not only the commercial sector, but also the political dialogues. and diplomatic. He recalled that on January 1, 2023, the decision was made to open all border bridges and he mentioned to Petro the importance of this fact.

“I think all of these steps, Chairman Petro, as we discussed personally, were necessary and inevitable, and they were also received with love, affection and support from the peoples of the border,” the dictator said. He also mentioned that although business activities are on the right track, this aspect still needs to be consolidated.

This agreement updates both the tariffs and the products to be exchanged for the border bridges, and opens the doors to what Maduro called a “new expansion dynamicbetween the trade of Colombia and Venezuela. He recalled that this country had better conditions in 2011, when this agreement was signed for the first time.