The recent injection of more than 400 million dollars into the national banks by the Central Bank of Venezuela has generated more questions than solutions in the current economic panorama. Simón Calzadilla, general secretary of the Movement for Venezuela (MPV), warned through his social networks that, although the arrival of foreign currency is necessary to meet the demand of citizens and companies, the process is flawed by an alarming lack of transparency.
For the leader, it is “unacceptable that the country does not know both the real placement price and the technical criteria that determine how much money each financial entity receives, leaving exchange rate policy in a field of absolute discretion.”
In Calzadilla’s opinion, this lack of clarity is not limited to the distribution of money, but extends to the conditions of access for end users.
Calzadilla harshly questioned the fact that there are no public and clear rules so that natural and legal clients can acquire these currencies, which in his opinion evidences a “capricious” management of public finances.
According to the leader of the MPV, “the country is facing a kind of administrative darkness, where the common citizen is left out of the information flow of one of the largest financial operations of the week.”
The most critical point of the complaint lies in the obvious price distortion that the issuing entity itself seems to promote. Calzadilla pointed out a contradiction that is difficult to explain: “while the Central Bank maintains an official reference dollar located at 483.33 bolivars, at the same time it offers these currencies to the banks for sale at 575 bolivars per unit. “This gap between the official rate and the real sales rate not only generates confusion in the market, but also calls into question the coherence of the BCV’s policies to curb monetary instability,” he said.
Finally, the general secretary of the MPV insisted that this situation is a symptom of a structural problem that the organization has been denouncing since last January.
“The recovery of the Venezuelan economy does not depend solely on the injection of capital, but on the urgent need to restore the autonomy and institutional transparency of the Central Bank,” he added.
For Calzadilla, without clear rules of the game and public accountability, any attempt to stabilize the value of the currency will be insufficient in the face of the distrust generated by the hermetic management of State resources.
