CARACAS, Venezuela | Venezuelan authorities have raided currency trading offices and arrested a man who posts black-market rates for currency on the Internet as President Hugo Chavez ramps up efforts to defend the country’s embattled currency.
Jaime Renteria, 52, is apparently the first person arrested for illegal currency trading under Mr. Chavez’s new crackdown, which has been prompted by a sharp decline in the free-market value of the bolivar.
Mr. Renteria is the registered administrator of notidolar.com a website that offered visitors a chance to exchange Venezuela’s bolivar currency, according to a version cached by Google.
His downtown Caracas office was one of four raided Friday night, according to the government’s Bolivarian News Agency. It said police were investigating other offices as well. There was no answer at Mr. Renteria’s phone number on Sunday.
The crackdown on traders and threats to punish websites that report the bolivar’s decline on the black market has alarmed economists, who predicted on Sunday that the measures will backfire.
“Unfortunately, this new scheme is going to end up increasing inflation, bringing about shortages of products and creating more distortions in the currency market,” said Asdrubal Oliveros, an analyst at the Caracas-based Ecoanalitica think tank.
Mr. Oliveros said the bolivar’s slide is largely caused by uncertainty over the government’s efforts to control trading of U.S. dollars on Venezuela’s black market and in the bond market previously dominated by brokerage firms.
Friday’s raids were prompted by Mr. Chavez’s demands for officials to halt regulated trading. Federal Police Chief Wilmer Flores said investigators “gathered criminal evidence” at the offices of informal exchange businesses, so prosecutors can “determine criminal liabilities of the owners of these establishments.”
Mr. Chavez joked that he could attempt to capture illegal foreign currency traders himself, posing as a potential buyer on Internet sites only to apprehend the dealers later. “I’m going to grab a computer and begin to buy those dollars … but it’s to capture them,” he said.
The bolivar has been steadily sliding on the unregulated market, increasing in recent weeks to about 8.20 bolivars to the dollar — almost twice the official rate of 4.30 applied to nonessential goods.
The government is worried because the rising price of dollars on the so-called parallel market increases the cost of consumer goods in Venezuela, which imports more than half the products it consumes despite Mr. Chavez’s efforts to boost domestic production.
Consumer prices jumped 5.2 percent in April alone, driving the annual inflation rate to 30.4 percent — the highest in Latin America — according to the Central Bank and National Statistics Institute.
An average of $1.4 million is exchanged daily either on the black market or at the floating rate through the government bond market — a total of $28 billion in 2009, according to Ecoanalitica.
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