Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has restored the division of roles of oil minister and head of state-owned PdV, as part of a wider reshuffle announced late yesterday.
The new oil minister will be the chief executive of PdV's Houston-based refining and marketing subsidiary Citgo, Nelson Martinez, who assumed that role on top of the post of chairman of Citgo in June 2013. A veteran of PdV since 1980, Martinez was educated in France, the UK and the US, and has worked in Europe, Venezuela and the US. His replacement has not yet been announced.
Outgoing oil minister Eulogio del Pino will continue to head up PdV, a role he had held for one year prior to his appointment as minister in August 2015. Since then, much of his time has been taken up with furthering the attempts of the Caracas government to persuade Opec and other oil producing countries to take action to reverse the slide in oil prices that began in mid-2015.
At the end of last year Opec, supported by a number of other producer countries, agreed to cut production from 1 January this year in an attempt to speed rebalancing of the market. Venezuela was nominated as one of the countries to sit on a monitoring committee to police the cuts, so one of Martinez's first trips is likely to be to Vienna later this month for the first meeting of that committee.
