The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, said this Sunday that the advance payment of the Covax plan, for which the country will purchase 11,374,400 vaccines against covid-19, was made with money that was “freed” from the “kidnapping.” of resources that, he assures, has been made by the United States Government.
“It was the release of some resources that were seized by the United States Government and we managed to free them, they were deposited in Swiss francs because if they were deposited in dollars they would be stolen by the United States federal reserve and the (Venezuelan) right,” said Maduro in an address broadcast by the state channel VTV.
He assured that the operation was carried out with “intelligence, wisdom” and “financial capacity” and added that he will not offer further details.
As he said, “at the time” it will be known how he did it, although he insisted on the complaint that Washington has “kidnapped” Venezuelan resources as a result of the economic sanctions against his government.
“What I can tell you is that it is a resource rescued from the sequestration of the federal reserve and we have already obtained the rest to reach 100% of the deposit of the Covax system,” he insisted.
He added that his country will continue to press for them to release the 7,000 million dollars that Venezuela has “kidnapped” in the world.
“Sooner rather than later we are going to make all these resources free to buy medicines,” he said.
On Saturday, Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez announced that Venezuela had given an advance of more than 50%, about 64 million dollars, for the payment of the Covax plan coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) and that, according to complaints from the The government itself had not been canceled due to the “blocking of resources.”
According to the vice president, the amount canceled was 59.2 million Swiss francs, that is, about 64 million dollars out of a total of 119,999,920 million dollars to purchase more than 11 million vaccines.
The United States Government has imposed a series of sanctions on the Maduro Executive that prevent him from accessing funds in that country.
The measures taken by the United States are due to the fact that it does not recognize Maduro as president of Venezuela for having been elected in a process that, they believe, did not have democratic guarantees and for that reason it granted its recognition to the opposition leader Juan Guaidó.
In mid-March, Guaidó announced that he was going to apply to the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for a license to access the funds and pay for the Covax plan.
However, after the announcement made yesterday by the vice president, Guaidó said that the advance made by the Maduro government was the product of pressure on the president and pointed out that the cancellation of the mechanism showed that the sanctions imposed did not prevent the payment of the drugs.