NYT/AP: Venezuela to Investigate Oil Companies

[DeepModem Mom]

Venezuela to Investigate Oil Companies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 8, 2005
Filed at 4:40 p.m. ET


CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that foreign oil companies working in the country must pay taxes he insists they owe the country, or else leave the country.

''The companies must pay what they owe,'' Chavez said during his Sunday television and radio show. ''If they don't pay, they must leave,'' he added.

Chavez said that many private companies producing oil in the company have been evading taxes for years. Tax officials have said that many declare losses to avoid paying income tax.

Chavez said that they must be charged retroactively.

The government will charge ''everything they owe retroactively, along with the interests of what they didn't pay,'' he said....


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Venezuela-Oil-Companies.html

[KlatooBNikto]

1. This guy is a radical and must go! Hasn't he heard of the divine right

of U.S. corporations to plunder other people's wealth?Paying taxes? What is that? If they don't pay taxes in the U.S., what makes Chavez think he can collect taxes from them in Venezuela? Doesn't Venezuela belong to these corporations?

[BR_Parkway]

2. And it's fine if they leave, since Venezuela knows China will

happily buy it.

[Robbien]

3. The oil companies don't pay taxes because they say there is no profit

on their operations in Venezuela.

Now why is it that I do not believe a company who tells Wall Street they have billons in profit each quarter when they tell Venezuela that their operations in Venezuela occur a loss.

[leftofcool]

4. Excuse me, Mr. Chavez..............

Didn't you get the memo that said it was okay for US corporations to rape your country/land/people?

Left of Cool

[many a good man]

5. Ouch! Isn't that exactly what they said in

Iran
Guatemala
Chile
.
.
.

[Javaman]

6. This guy just painted a bullseye on his forhead for moron*...

[IChing]

7. brazil and argentina

governments own the major of shares in their largest oil companies and
brazil will be independent of imports by 2005-2006

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x23419

So they control the tax and energy policies and not the oil companies

Get It?

[Daphne08]

8. "Calling Condi, Calling Condi"

She needs to go down there right now and straighten him out! :eyes:

[Joebert]

9. A shame, he seemed like such a nice guy

Too bad he's going to end up shooting himself in the head 4 times from behind.

Another senseless suicide.

How do I declare my house a sovereign country and secede from ths US?

[GirlinContempt]

10. He's doing no such thing

The coups have failed. The people are behind him. AND, if the US government doesn't understand that the education and the passion of the Venezuelan Bolivian people has gone beyond Chavez, that Chavez is not Venezuela, that the people will only find someone else, become more militant, more inflamed, and more beautiful, they need to get their heads checked.

[bennywhale]

11. I can feel a war

coming on

[burrowowl]

23. According to the

OAS (Organization of American States) of which the U$A is member cannot attack a member state.
Of course, Bu$h seems to ignore such things.

[bennywhale]

24. The Monroe Doctrine

will ensure than Venezuala does what we say by force or otherwise

[Judi Lynn]

12. Hope Latin America will be strong enough this time to unite

against Republican dreams of domination. They used to pick on one small country at a time. I pray that this time _Bush is going to see a strength and a will to risist his vicious, cowardly use of American lives to destroy people elsewhere to get more money and control for a filthy group of amoral, contemptible, lazy, cowardly personally incapable scum like him and his fellow pervs.

All the time, they've been shrieking about how moral, how lawful, how just they are. Isn't that vile?

He will spill blood in this hemisphere, if there is any possiblility, just like his twisted dad, and Ronald Reagan, bad actor who happened to be one of the only Republicans who could put a few sentences together, one way or another.

It's their deficiencies which drive them to strike back at life by trying to control everything in sight before they expire.

[GirlinContempt]

14. I think

that any attack on Venezuela will incite such a rage in Latin America, and many parts of the world, it couldn't help but fail.

[AP]

19. I wonder if it's a coincidence that, as RW'ers lose their control over...

...developing countries, they turn to the American middle class to make them wealthy.

Unsupportable debt and oppressed labor -- used to be that treatement was reserved for Nicaraguans and Haitians and their neighbors. But the less they can do it to them, the more they do it to US citizens.

[Zorra]

13. Heh. Chavez is really "holding them over a barrel". n/t

[NNN0LHI]

15. Chavez Says Oil Companies That Don't Pay Taxes Must Leave the Country

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBWI7JPH8E.html

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that foreign oil companies working in the country must pay taxes he insists they owe the country, or else leave the country.

"The companies must pay what they owe," Chavez said during his Sunday television and radio show. "If they don't pay, they must leave," he added.

Chavez said that many private companies producing oil in the company have been evading taxes for years. Tax officials have said that many declare losses to avoid paying income tax.

Chavez said that they must be charged retroactively.

The government will charge "everything they owe retroactively, along with the interests of what they didn't pay," he said.

[MasonJar]

16. Hurrah! The corps need a big knot tied in their sable tail; it is

time that they learn not to cheat other countries like they do the US. They may get called on it.

[katsy]

17. Is there a link to e-mail congrats to this guy????

And a resume?

Sheeeeeeeeesh I love him.

[Straight Shooter]

18. Any stupid "Kick their ass and take their gas" comments from the Freepers?

It's funny that bush measures higher in feet and inches, but somehow Chavez just seems a lot taller.

[Al-CIAda]

20. Keep well Mr.Chavez. n/t

[Mika]

21. Very similar to what Mr Castro did in Cuba.

Our way or the highway.








www.stopbolton.org

[Skink]

22. Isn't he trying to aquire Nukes....

Or maybe he is harboring Bin Laden. Yeah that's it. He's running one really big terrorist training camp. Yeah that's the ticket.

[GirlinContempt]

25. God damn President! Commie!

making everyone obey the laws of the country, or telling the illegal bastards to leave! Standing up and asking for the money which is his countries, is meant to support social programs and the like, just ASKING for it from corporations that agreed to obey the laws of his country when they signed up for the deal.
Sheesh.
What an unreasonable bastard.

[dArKeR]

26. Tom Delay devised the plan to exempt US Tobacco from paying taxes in

South/Central America. Delay excluded US Tobacco from the Patriot Act. US Tobacco illegally runs their goods to S/C America using gangs, mafia, terrorists members... to avoid paying taxes to these countries. Why hasn't this come up with the lobbiest crap?

Big Tobacco - by Mark Schapiro

Tobacco is one of the most globalized industries on the planet. More cigarettes are traded than any other single product, some trillion "sticks," as they're known in the business, passing international borders each year. As a result, American brands have been propelled into every corner of the world, with just four companies controlling 70 percent of the global market. Marlboro, Kool, Kent: They have become as omnipresent around the world as they are here in the United States. With declining sales in this country, foreign markets have become increasingly critical to the tobacco companies' financial health: The top US tobacco firms now earn more from cigarettes sold abroad than in the United States. How they got there is a tale that leads straight into a global underground of smugglers and money launderers who have played a key role in facilitating the tobacco companies' entry into foreign markets…

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020506&s=schapiro

+++++++++++++++++++

How Big Tobacco Subverted Anti-Terror Act

How Big Tobacco nicked terror act Firms accused of smuggling cigarettes feared language on laundering

Mark Shaprio
MSNBC

NEW YORK, June 13 — On the one-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the tobacco industry took aim at Congress’ first effort to respond to the crisis with a major piece of new legislation — the Patriot Act. Why would America’s largest tobacco companies take an interest in a bill designed to go after America’s terrorist adversaries?

THE ANSWER: legal liability. Not that the tobacco companies are terrorists, but some of their marketing and distribution strategies look awfully similar to the illegal financing systems used by terrorists. At least they do from the U.S. Department of Justice perspective.

To get to the bottom of this story, we need to return to those traumatized days last fall, in which our lives were filled with fears of another terrorist attack, the retaliation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and shock and horror at the revelation that anthrax had contaminated the halls of
Congress.

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/intl-tobacco/2002q2/000750.html

++++++++++++++++

Cigarette giant denies smoking leads to cancer - Imperial Tobacco

A giant British tobacco company is to take the unprecedented step this week of denying there is a proven causal link between smoking and lung cancer in the first case against a cigarette firm to go to a UK court.

The unique defense, to be heard in Scotland's Court of Session, denies decades of scientific proof of such a link, which was accepted by the British Government in 1957.

Imperial Tobacco is being sued for £500,000 (US$835,000) by Margaret McTear, whose husband, Alf, a 60-a-day smoker from Beith near Glasgow, died of lung cancer in 1993. The case, which starts tomorrow, will be scrutinized across Europe by lawyers who want to bring similar actions against tobacco firms.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2003/10/06/2003070628


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Venezuela warns foreign oil companies
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2005/05/10/2003253976