Venezuela: the case of PDVAL (122,000 tons of rotten food bought with public money)
Funny to see some out-of-context foreign chavista deny this 2 years later, while the local chavista try hard to explain the thousands of tones of rotten food were, in fact, the result of a sabotage. Get your version straight noobies.
Why does the food that we, Venezuelan tax payers, bought get spoiled this way? Because, the government uses PSUV State contractors linked to the State oil company to buy and distribute the food. Those people receive commissions which are proportionate to the quantities they buy. The more we buy, the better for them. Only the food gets rotten.
It was in 2010.
122,000 lost tons
The spoiled food could have been used to feed 17 million people a month. Businessmen at Puerto Cabello had warned against an excess of Pdval imports. Why they were not listened to?
At least half Venezuelans could have eaten for one month with the rotten food that was found over the past few weeks. Excluding the packages of beans or mayonnaise found in the dumping site of Tiguadara, western Falcón state, recent complaints total almost 122,000 tons of food that was lost before arriving in the country's fridges and shelves.
"All this could have been the monthly shopping of more than three million Venezuelan families," ex deputy Carlos Berrizbeitia reckoned. If each container makes room for 28,000 kilograms and an average individual consumes seven kilograms a month, the account of the leader of opposition Proyecto Venezuela party shows that -throughout 30 days- 17 million people could have been fed with the containers and sacks of products that were found stockpiled in several places in the states of Carabobo, Cojedes, Yaracuy and Zulia.
The government lost hold of the situation, at least, as declared by Virginia Mares, the president of Pdval, a food distributor run by state-owned oil holding Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa). "We were swamped with containers, because all of them arrived at the same time," she said on June 9. "We imported 761,000 tons of food, which even had to get at other ports in the meantime, as the port of Puerto Cabello flowed."
The queues at maritime customs stopped being a secret long time ago. Nonetheless, Pdval imported above its capacity. Eight months ago, the Puerto Cabello Chamber of Commerce warned against exceeding government imports.
http://www.eluniversal.com/2010/06/25/en_ing_esp_122,000-lost-tons_25A4076611.shtml