VENEZUELAN Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza condemned the EU's “shameful” sanctioning of seven top officials on Monday as proof of Brussels' “subordination” to Washington.  Mr Arreaza said Venezuela rejected the measures imposed “in an illegal and unilateral manner,” which “violate the fundamental precepts of the UN Charter and are intended to exercise a gross interference in the internal affairs of our country.” He said the move indicated an “erratic and interventionist policy towards our country” which recalled the “colonialist manoeuvres of ancient empires, expelled from our America 200 years ago by the courage and freedom-loving will of our peoples.” The foreign minister said the “obsessive conduct towards Venzuela” was turning the EU into “an instrument at the service of the imperialist intents of the US government.” Earlier on Monday, unelected EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini's office announced the sanctions, claiming the seven were "involved ...

CORRUPT Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht funded opposition parties in Venezuela and elsewhere, its former CEO told Peruvian prosecutors on Wednesday. Marcelo Odebrecht told a hearing the corporation paid off the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) coalition and other opposition parties across the continent to dissuade them from challenging corruptly-awarded contracts. “Our intention was to support many candidates of the opposition, even knowing that they would not be elected,” he said. “We supported them in some way because the opposition can also create problems.” “One way to create a network is through support,” Mr Odebrecht added. “The way to avoid the opposition was precisely to attend to its campaign needs.” Court documents show the corporation paid more than £70 million to Venezuelan “government officials and intermediaries” between 2006 and 2015. Last June former Odebrecht Venezuela director Euzenando Azevedo confessed to depositing money in a privat...

SOLIDARITY campaigners attacked a former Venezuelan minister’s unprecedented call for foreign military invasion to end a claimed “famine” yesterday. Britain’s Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) slammed Ricardo Hausmann for his article entitled “ D-Day Venezuela ”, published on Tuesday by the Czech-based Project Syndicate website — funded by regime-change NGO kingpin George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The Harvard University professor and former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank claimed Venezuela’s economic woes — which the government blames on a US-directed economic war and black market spivs — had created a “famine.” The United Socialist Party (PSUV) government has moved to reduce the problems poor Venezuelans have in buying food by supplying monthly subsidised food parcels to all households at a price equivalent to a few pounds. Mr Hausmann equated the situation to that in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1944-45, when around 20,000 people died of m...