Search Results for: Venezuela

The Venezuelan government’s economic policies have created a boom in smuggling contraband meat and livestock to neighbouring Colombia. The trade is pushing down Colombian prices, putting consumers at risk and threatening the country’s hopes of becoming an export nation.

Between January and September this year, Colombia’s tax and customs police (Policia Fiscal y Aduanera – POLFA) made over USD1 million worth of seizures of meat and livestock in the form of 106 tonnes of beef, 4 tonnes of pork, 11 tonnes of chicken, 1,024 live cows, 243 pigs and 23,100 chickens.…

Transnational medicine mafias are exploiting the differences between the economic and healthcare models of socialist Venezuela and its free market neighbour Colombia to run a thriving trade in contraband pharmaceuticals.
Every year, networks of smugglers, corrupt officials, and shady businessmen move millions of dollars worth of contraband, expired and false drugs between the two countries, undermining the legal pharmaceutical sector and posing a grave health threat on both sides of the border.…

Colombia has become something of a specialist in dismantling criminal cartels throughout the years, with the cocaine kings of the Medellín Cartel, the Cali Cartel and the Norte del Valle Cartel all consigned to history. Now, the country’s authorities have a new cartel in their sights – a price-fixing nappy cartel headed by the biggest names in the domestic market.…

THE MARKET distorting economic policies of Venezuela’s government were supposed to help the country’s poor, but instead have created a boom in contraband smuggling into neighbouring Colombia, generating massive profits for organized crime, James Bargent reports.

CONTRABAND and smuggling permeate every aspect of economic life in the windswept Colombian border city of Cúcuta.…

A potential bonanza of new projects may be offered to Chinese construction companies following the set-up of a new development bank with lots of cash for infrastructure projects. This July marked the launch of the so-called ‘BRICS Bank’, a new multilateral development bank, operated by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.…

Chinese construction firms have cornered plenty of business in Africa and Latin America, but they need upskilling to consolidate their position. Anyone who observes the queues of nervous young men lining up in the early morning in Beijing’s tree-lined Sanlitun diplomatic district will be in no doubt of the intensity of Chinese activity in Africa and Latin America.…

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) oil refining industry is looking at September as the time when the European Commission may propose a new way to implement the bloc’s fuel quality directive (FQD). This would break a deadlock of almost three years, with Brussels tabling its last proposed technical rules on how the 2009 law should work in October 2011.…

PRODUCTION at Venezuela state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) has slumped under mounting financial pressures, building during the past 15 years when revenues have been tapped by its socialist government to fund social programmes, diplomatic initiatives and other non-commercial policies.…

IN the 1970s and 1980s, the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean did not have a comprehensively robust reputation for sound financial management. Many Caribbean island states had newly emerged from colonialism, finding their way as independent countries. And many Latin American countries were riven by social discord, even civil war, with many under military rule.…

Latin America’s cosmetics and personal care products sector has boomed as consumers take advantage of their rising disposable incomes. The region (including Mexico) accounted for 17% of global sales in the beauty and personal care industry, according to market analysts Euromonitor International in 2013. …