Tag: Venezuela

Britain’s Foreign Office spent £80,697 in public funds supporting Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó’s campaign to seize roughly $2bn of gold held in the Bank of England, documents obtained by Declassified show. The data highlights the extent to which the UK government has assisted Guaidó’s efforts to access Venezuelan state assets, with the Foreign Office […]

In late December, Venezuela’s leading opposition parties voted to oust Juan Guaidó as “interim president” and dissolve his parallel government. This was clearly not the ending the UK government had in mind. Four years ago, the British government made the bold decision to recognise Guaidó as Venezuelan president, and proceeded to facilitate his legal battle […]

The head of a secretive British government “reconstruction” unit held meetings in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, to plan for UK involvement in the country’s energy sector. A record of the meetings is included in documents released under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, but which are heavily redacted, and were provided over a year after a […]

Alan Duncan, the foreign minister responsible for the Americas from 2016-19, spoke to Vitol’s chief executive Ian Taylor “to gather information on the state of” Venezuela’s oil industry, Declassified can reveal. The conversation only became public knowledge when Duncan, a former oil trader himself, applied for permission to the UK government to take up a […]

The UK government has established a journalism project to ‘influence’ Venezuela’s ‘media agenda’ while a Foreign Office-funded foundation is spending £750,000 on a secretive ‘democracy-promotion’ programme in the country, as Britain appears to deepen efforts to remove the Maduro government.

UK attempts to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro may be linked to British oil interests in neighbouring Guyana where UK companies stand to profit from offshore oil-rich Essequibo, a territory that is claimed by Venezuela.

The British government has surreptitiously given £450,000 from its overseas aid budget to establish an ‘anti-corruption’ coalition in Venezuela through a controversial fund which claims to ‘tackle instability and to prevent conflicts that threaten UK interests’, it can be revealed.