{"id":874,"date":"2006-08-28T09:49:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-28T09:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maddruid.com\/wp\/?p=874"},"modified":"2006-10-09T23:44:20","modified_gmt":"2006-10-09T15:44:20","slug":"872-of-bye-bye-chad-hello-venezuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/?p=874","title":{"rendered":"[872] Of bye bye Chad, hello Venezuela"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s likely that many Malaysians and others have already read that Petronas &#8211; the giant Malaysian state-owned oil and gas company &#8211; has been kicked out of Chad. In a rather suspicious way too. The Chadian president alleges that Petronas fails to pay taxes to the Chadian government. After doing some reading, I feel the expulsion of Petronas is an exercise by Chad to forcefully nationalize part of Chadian oil and gas industry. That taxes stuff is simply <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2006\/WORLD\/africa\/08\/26\/chad.oil.reut\/index.html?section=cnn_topstories\">a red-herring<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The surprise move followed Chad&#8217;s decision to create a new national oil company, which it said should become a partner in the country&#8217;s existing oil-producing consortium, led by U.S. major Exxon Mobil and including Chevron and Petronas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a Malaysian and you haven&#8217;t heard of the expulsion, then you&#8217;re probably too busy talking about a wedding between a Malaysian pop star and er, somebody.<\/p>\n<p>Interestingly, the People&#8217;s Republic of China seems to have a hand on the Malaysian explusion given that the PRC stands to directly benefit from Malaysian loss. So, it&#8217;s kind of hard to shrug off the idea that the PRC might have a hand on this.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever PRC role in this expulsion is, if Petronas is kicked out, Chad is stealing from Malaysian citizens. But then, given the fact that Chad was the world&#8217;s most corrupt nation according to Transparency International last year, we should have seen this coming.<\/p>\n<p>While that happens, here comes <a href=\"http:\/\/thestar.com.my\/news\/story.asp?file=\/2006\/8\/28\/nation\/20060828125016&#038;sec=nation\">Hugo Chavez to the rescue<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>KUALA LUMPUR: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez received a red-carpet welcome in Malaysia on Monday ahead of talks expected to focus on politics in the Middle East and cooperation in the oil and gas sector.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Socialist or not, black gold is still black gold. I&#8217;m sure even commies understand what that means.<\/p>\n<p>Who needs Chad, <em>eh<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>Welcome Hugo Chavez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s likely that many Malaysians and others have already read that Petronas &#8211; the giant Malaysian state-owned oil and gas company &#8211; has been kicked out of Chad. In a rather suspicious way too. The Chadian president alleges that Petronas fails to pay taxes to the Chadian government. After doing some reading, I feel the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}