Venezuela to reorganize PdV amid crisis

Venezuelan energy minister Manuel Quevedo created a new committee to reorganize struggling state-owned oil company PdV amid plummeting production and the imminent loss of its main overseas asset.

The five-member committee has a mandate to "propose within 30 days whatever adjustments are necessary to PdV's organization, administrative and functional structure, including fusions and liquidations" of PdV and its over 200 subsidiaries, according to a 4 September energy ministry resolution.

The committee is authorized to propose personnel reductions and new hires that could affect PdV´s over 100,000 employees.

PdV board member Miguel Quintana, currently vice president of engineering and planning, will head the committee and report directly to Quevedo, who is also PdV chief executive. The other four members are Jose Gregorio Gonzalez, Robert Perez, Hector Felizola and Henry Ardila. The energy ministry could not immediately provide information on the professional backgrounds of the four commissioners working under Quintana.

The mandate runs through December 2018.

The naming of a committee coincides with an unprecedented decline in Venezuelan crude production, which Argus estimates at around 1.2mn b/d, a third of the Opec country´s 1990s level. PdV´s refineries are also running at historically low levels or are off line altogether because of a shortage of parts and maintenance.

PdV is currently in default on almost all of its debt, and is facing the loss of its US refining subsidiary Citgo to arbitration claimant Crystallex.