2009-06-18 17:31:19 - Venezuelan Direccion de Inteligencia Militar (DIM) agents speaking exclusively to VHeadline on assurances that they will not be identified, have revealed that there may be suspicious ulterior motives in an apparent stonewall of silence from Toronto-based Canadian gold mining Crystallex International (KRY) on the subject of developments at the giant Las Cristinas goldfields in south-eastern Bolivar State.

VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes:

While Crystallex International president & CEO Robert Fung made a previously unannounced appearance with local subsidiary Crystallex de Venezuela C.A. president Jose Felipe Cottin for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new sewerage and water treatment plant at Las Claritas, in the San Isidro parish of Sifontes municipality. Also attending the inaugural bash were Bolivar State Governor Francisco Rangel Gomez and Mining Institute president John Madero along with local dignitaries.

Although the local and regional government delegation was dominated by members of President Hugo Chavez Frias' ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), no mention was made of the current impasse between Crystallex, the Venezuelan Guayana Corporation (CVG) and the Basic Industries & Mining

(Mibam) Ministry on a final permit to mine that was refused last year leaving the Canadian miner in limbo.



Our security sources say that Crystallex has been content, in the knowledge that they will never get the final permit to mine under a Chavez administration, to continue to fulfill the terms of its exclusive Las Cristinas mine operating contract with the CVG to the letter, while playing for time in an evident assumption that President Hugo Chavez Frias is about to be overthrown by an increasingly irate political opposition, which fields very powerful guns that are bitterly opposed to what they have very publicly declared to be the President's (Chavez') ambition to convert Venezuela into a Cuban-style communist dictatorship.

The Venezuelan government is already very much aware of Crystallex' family-style connections to former Venezuelan ambassador Enrique Tejera Paris who was pipped to the post to succeed Chavez as President after the April 2002 coup d'etat by Federation of Chambers of Commerce & Industry (Fedecamaras) president Pedro Carmona Estanga who now lives in neighboring Colombia. Crystallex de Venezuela retains an involvement with the Tejera Paris family although the now-elderly ex-ambassador has resigned as a Crystallex International director and local subsidiary chairman soon after the coup d'etat failed.

Given these circumstances, it is believed that the Canadian miner is quietly confident that it will be in prime position to take an advanced role in Venezuela's gold mining industry in a post-Chavez phase which the political opposition sees as returning Venezuela to conditionalities previous to Chavez' democratic election to power in December 1998.

Venezuelan security agencies are keeping a close watch on leading opposition personalities including former Zulia Governor and recently elected Maracaibo Mayor, Manuel Rosales, who is currently enjoying political asylum in Lima-Peru from a Chavez' threat of imprisonment. Venezuelan billionaire Gustavo Cisneros -- a close friend of Canadian billionaire Peter Munk, and a fellow-director of Barrick Gold -- is also seen as a contender for Chavez' "throne" especially since his latest run-in with Chavez over Coke Zero which one of Cisneros' plethora of corporations markets in Venezuela and elsewhere.

Sources also say that the chances of overthrowing Chavez are slim considering the overwhelming support of Venezuela's armed forces that he currently enjoys. However, rebel groups within the military are said already to be planning Chavez' ultimate demise and security sensitivities surrounding the President's entourage, especially his inner Praetorian Guard are such that the greatest fear is that an early assassination could be in sight ... this time orchestrated domestically although possibly with the blessing of the US CIA which remains "upset" over Chavez' insistence on the retariation to Venezuelan justice of old-timer CIA international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.

Perhaps for security reasons, Chavez has recently postponed flying visits to Chile etc., and a much-criticized visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg to meet Russian PM Putin and President Medvedev appears quietly to have been put on the back burner for a third time while Chavez will greet revolutionary confrere Rafael Correa, the President of Ecuador, next Wednesday ahead of a UN sponsored World Economic Crisis Conference in New York the following day which Chavez (secretly) may also attend.

Roy S. Carson
editor@vheadline.com

www.vheadline.com/carson

www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=80911