Venezuela: On 4 March the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac) issued a new general licence concerning the winding down of US oil firm Chevron’s activities in Venezuela. Issued less than a week after US President Donald Trump announced the revocation of Chevron’s special licence, which had exempted it from US sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, the new Ofac licence gives Chevron until 3 April to wind down its Venezuela operations. It also maintains restrictions that prohibit the company from paying taxes or royalties to the Venezuelan government or dividends to Venezuela’s state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa), among other things. In response, President Nicolás Maduro said on 8 March that the US decision would impact Venezuela’s cooperation with the repatriation of deported migrants. “Now we have a problem, because with this [the Ofac licence] they’ve damaged the dialogue that we’d opened, and which I had wanted to keep open, because I wanted to bring back all the Venezuelans who were unfairly held prisoner and persecuted just for being migrants,” Maduro said, adding that the Chevron decision had “affected the journeys” of migrants being deported to Venezuela. His comments came after the Wall Street Journal reported on 7 March that Venezuelan officials had privately warned the Trump administration that Venezuela will no longer receive deported migrants following the revocation of Chevron’s special licence.
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