President Chavez to nationalize Spanish-owned Banco Venezuela

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Advancing his policy of taking over major foreign companies, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Thursday that he would nationalize Spanish-owned Banco Venezuela, the country’s third-largest financial institution, writes Chris Kraul.

Chavez said during an afternoon telecast that he was seizing the bank because its owner, Banco Santander, was planning to sell it anyway. The Spanish concern, which acquired the bank in 1996, had not issued a formal comment by Thursday evening.

The announcement follows other nationalizations in recent years in which Chavez has paid foreign owners for their controlling interest in ‘strategic’ concerns to further his socialist ‘Bolivarean revolution.’

Read more on Venezuela here and the rest of this report here.