The government has arrested, jailed or fined 12,000 business managers for violating price decrees under the rollback.
There is a huge difference between a mix of private insurance companies negotiating with drug manufacturers and a massive government program that simply rules on prices by decree, ordering all drug manufacturers to offer a specific, steep discount.
In the aftermath of an abortive opposition attempt to strangle the government with a two-month strike in December and January, Mr Chávez decreed price and exchange controls.
Mr. Rodriguez returned from Vienna, however, saying that his fellow oil ministers had granted him the authority to enforce the price band by decreeing production increases or decreases as he saw fit, without convening a meeting of the whole group.
But since a meta-organization is neither a creature of the market nor is it a hierarchy there is no possibility of coordinating assets via spot prices nor through decree.
"OPEC is now holding the world on the string, and it can change the bearish sentiment around by displaying some resolve to control production". Nevertheless, analysts were more concerned with the reported discounting by the Saudis, which would mark a significant blow to the unity of OPEC, already frayed by feuding and duplicity in its own price and production decrees.
Under the decree, the price was reduced one piaster, or two and a third cents.
That law required the companies to cede production to YPFB, Bolivia's former state energy monopoly, which would set its price and sell it.The decree puts this into immediate effect.
A suggested cause is that a multitude of frequently changed regulations, at times extended to ridiculous specifics (such as a 1947 decree setting prices and menus for restaurants), choked economic activity.
We see the bad news every day (Western reporting on Venezuela is almost exclusively bad news, as if by decree): consumer prices up 49percentt over the last year; a black market where the dollar fetches seven times the official rate; shortages of consumer goods from milk to toilet paper; the economy slowing, Central Bank reserves falling.
