St Vincent and the Grenadines is not receiving fuel anymore under the Petro Caribe program. This was disclosed by Prime Minister Gonsalves at a media conference in Kingstown.
Gonsalves said the common reason for this is due to sanctions the US has placed on Venezuela.
“It has an indirect effect on us, in respect of the trade in fuel, the big tankers do not come to SVG, these are not tankers which have been contracted for and paid for in a number of different ways, they have to use small vessels to transport the fuel”.
Gonsalves said the problem is these vessels are not owned by Venezuela and must be paid for as he was advised through a US account.
“We have a small sum of money for Venezuela under the Petro Caribe agreement, but we cannot get it to them because of the financial restrictions, if you cannot get money to the shippers, the ships are not coming”.
“ We have given reports over and over what we use Petro Caribe money for, the staff at the mission in the South American country, we cannot get the money to them, so when you have some right wing people here and some others who are unthinking, say ah what a wonderful thing the US is doing squeezing Venezuela , they don’t realize what they are supporting is to even hurt ourselves”.
