Ramirez threatens oil service companies

Venezuela’s Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez has threatened to take over oil service companies that fail to agree on new rates for their services, in one of several comments made to oil workers.

“To those contractors who stopped work during the 2002 oil strike, we’ve told them it’s time to settle accounts and rates, change our relationship, or we will take over those companies,” Ramirez told PDVSA employees during a videoconference last Friday, according to a full transcript of the speech published today.

PDVSA officials could not immediately comment on the document published on the company website, said a Dow Jones Newswire report.

“We will not pay [the bills] of contractor companies that have pretended to speculate and don’t care about our company,” he added, without naming company names.

“To those drill companies: you speculated [with rates] in 2007 and 2008, now we have to reset those rates,” he said in apparent reference to the difficulty PDVSA faced in securing affordable equipment in times of high oil prices.

Upstream Online