On state television on Friday night, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro accused Daka, an electronics company, of selling products at an "unjustified" price at five of its stores, and announced that he was ordering the confiscation of their inventories, which would then be put on sale at a "fair price", to be established by the government. These "supervised sales" come in reaction to inflation rates of 5 percent in the month of October, making it 54 percent within the last year. Maduro has long blamed inflation on price speculators, who he says are launching an "economic war" on the Venezuelan public. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch a clip from a Maduro speech on Saturday (in Spanish).
On Saturday, Maduro followed up Friday's announcement with another in which he said the "supervised sales" would be extended to other appliance retailers and added that some of the managers and owners of establishments which his government found to engage in speculation had been arrested. And on Sunday, he said that those operations would move beyond appliance stores into other types of goods, including food, footwear, hardware, toys, vehicles and clothing, according to El Pais. He also said in his Sunday speech that he was not ruling out the possibility that the state could retain control over some of the businesses if their owners and managers had fled to escape apprehension. Speculators, he said, could face up to 30 years in prison-the maximum allowed by the Venezuelan Constitution - if the National Assembly grants him the powers he is seeking.
Maduro said that once the National Assembly - which is dominated by his United Socialist Party of Venezuela - passed a bill granting him special legislative powers over the economy, he would set minimum and maximum profit margins for all sectors of the Venezuelan economy. "I have decided that, once the enabling law is passed, mandatory percentage limits on profit margins will be implemented on all items," he said. "There will be minimum and maximum profit margins for everything, in the first place. Secondly, we will also use the enabling law to make adjustments intended to toughen as much as possible the penalties for any businessperson who is sold US dollars of the Republic through the established system (...) and uses the US dollars of the Republic to speculate on the currency, to speculate on products and rob and plunder the people."
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