Daily Times

Venezuela has launched an anti-corruption probe of state oil firm PDVSA and other related government bodies that has seen 51 people arrested, including top government officials.

“We’re going with everything, those who fall will fall,” said President Nicolas Maduro.

In a country ranked 177th out of 180 by Transparency International in its corruption perception index, is this an anti-corruption crusade, or a political purge?

The first arrests, announced on March 19, related to close allies of Tareck El Aissami, a powerful figure in the ruling regime who until that point was the oil minister.

El Aissami has kept a low profile since resigning and Attorney General Tarek William Saab refuses to confirm whether or not he is under investigation.

One of those detained was Antonio Perez, the PDVSA vice-president. Another was Hugo Cabezas, who was a close ally of the late former president Hugo Chavez.

Others are Pedro Maldonado, the president of the corporation responsible for exploiting minerals such as gold, diamonds, iron and bauxite, and Nestor Astudillo, head of the state Orinoco Steel company.

All have appeared in court dressed in orange jumpsuits.

Saab said on Wednesday, “There could be more arrests.”

“It’s a political purge,” political scientist Ana Milagros Parra told AFP. “You shouldn’t view it as anything extraordinary.”

Milagros said it was happening because of “the need to eliminate or remove from the circle of power people who represent in one way or another a threat (to the government) or are not in line.”

That is a claim passionately rejected by Saab. “Since when is corruption, embezzlement a political act? Where is the ideology there? Is stealing an ideology? No!” he said.

For Alberto Aranguibel, an analyst with ties to the government, it is “courageous” to tackle corruption and in a newspaper article he criticized the idea that the state is “one single organ equally devoured by the cancer of corruption.”