TEHRAN, Feb 15 - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government stepped up a legal battle against efforts to oust him on Thursday, while the opposition said the international community had pledged more than $100 million in humanitarian aid for the country.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - Venezuela's opposition, which argues Maduro's presidency is illegitimate because he won in a sham vote, is trying to wrest control of the OPEC nation's oil sector from him and deliver aid to a population suffering food and medicine shortages.
Maduro says this is part of a strategy to carry out a U.S.-backed coup and has vowed to remain in office, despite around 50 nations recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as president. Maduro retains the backing of key allies Russia and China as well as control of Venezuelan state institutions including the military.
Venezuela's chief state prosecutor, Tarek Saab, said on Thursday his office had opened an investigation into new opposition-appointed directors at state-run oil firm PDVSA and its U.S. refiner Citgo, Venezuela's most valuable foreign asset.
The pro-Maduro Supreme Court then ruled that the proposed board members were prohibited from leaving the country. At least some of the people are believed to already be outside Venezuela.
Saab said Guaido had "grotesquely made circus-style appointments" in order to please foreign interests and destabilize the country.
"The only directors legitimately appointed to the boards of PDVSA and its subsidiaries are those ... who have been appointed by the executive," Saab said, according to his office's Twitter account.
As head of the National Assembly, Guaido invoked constitutional provisions last month to assume the interim presidency.
The transitional government should include members of the ruling "Chavismo" movement and military leadership, in an effort to guarantee stability for new elections, a top opposition lawmaker said.
That interim government would have 13 months to hold fresh presidential elections from the date Maduro officially steps down as president, Stalin Gonzalez, the second vice president of the congress, told Reuters.
"We need to give space to sectors of Chavismo that are not Maduro because we need political stability," Gonzalez said in an interview.
Source: Reuters
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