Venezuela intensified its nationalisation fight with foreign companies today, vowing to impose a takeover of oil operations and grab all of a US utility's stake in the country's largest private power company.
The Opec nation's energy minister revealed that President Hugo Chavez's announcement last week of a new nationalisation drive meant Venezuela was ending months-long talks with some of the world's biggest companies over planned oil takeovers.
Rafael Ramirez also said Mr Chavez's plan to nationalize the electricity sector included taking US-based AES Corp's 87 per cent stake in the sector's flagship company.
The takeover of Electricidad de Caracas could also come much sooner than many investors expected, with Mr Ramirez saying at a news conference it was a "reasonable" goal to complete the move by the end of June.
Since a landslide re-election last month, Mr Chavez has consolidated power over the media and political parties and his minister's remarks underscore the harder line he intends to take against foreign companies in his new six-year term.
"We gave them enough time but now negotiations are impossible," Mr Ramirez said of talks over the state taking a majority stake in multibillion dollar projects in the Orinoco belt.
Instead the government would impose the takeover by passing a new law, he added.
Mr Chavez is armed with a strong mandate but he is taking on businesses with bigger earnings than most nations - including Exxon Mobil, the world's largest company - for control over what he calls the earth's hugest oil reserve.
The anti-US former soldier who says Cuban President Fidel Castro is his mentor has used record oil revenues to finance a self-described socialist revolution for the poor majority.
Now he wants more of that income and the battle is over four projects worth an estimated $33 billion that would give Chavez domain over a reserve believed to hold up to 235 billion barrels of tar-like oil.
Six companies - Chevron, Conoco, Exxon Mobil, BP, Norway's Statoil and France's Total - have invested around $20 billion for 60 per cent of the joint ventures, with state oil firm PDVSA already holding the rest.
The companies have declined to comment on the nationalisation offensive.