Aurelia Butler

Authorities in Venezuela had asked Interpol to locate and arrest Ramirez in 2018 and subsequently demanded his extradition from Italy in 2020 in connection with embezzlement charges.Ramirez, who denies the corruption allegations, says President Nicolas Maduro’s administration is seeking to smear him over his anti-government comments.”The Italian Supreme Court has declared definitively inadmissible the extradition request,” Ramirez’s Italian lawyer Roberto De Vita told Reuters.He said the court had backed a previous ruling that Ramirez could not be sent back to Venezuela because of human rights violations in the South American state.Court rulings in Italy are initially delivered to those involved in the case and the verdict has not yet been published on the Supreme Court website.Ramirez served for a decade as oil minister and president of state oil company PDVSA, which controls some of the largest crude reserves in the world.Venezuela’s Supreme Court said on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) in 2020 that Ramirez faced criminal charges including embezzlement and bid-rigging for oil contracts.He was ousted from his post as Venezuela’s U.N. envoy in 2017 after publicly criticizing Maduro and the status of the OPEC nation’s oil industry. Ramirez had been a close confidant and remains an admirer of the late former president Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor and mentor. More

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sacked the head of the national statistical institute after reports of tension between them over the country’s inflation data.A decree published in the country’s official gazette early on Saturday morning announced the removal of Sait Erdal Dincer, after the official rate of inflation reached a 19-year high of 36 per cent in December. He had served just 10 months in the role.He was replaced by Erhan Cetinkaya, who was previously a vice-chair of the country’s banking regulator.Erdogan, a life-long opponent of high interest rates, rejects the economic orthodoxy that raising interest rates helps to curb inflation, arguing that low rates will usher in price stability.He ordered the central bank to cut interest rates four times in the final months of last year and the Turkish lira plummeted in value. The removal of Dincer comes after weeks of speculation in the Turkish media about friction between him and Erdogan over the rising official inflation rate. At the same time, TurkStat has come under heavy pressure from opposition parties, who have accused it of manipulating the data to show inflation at an artificially low rate.Dincer rejected that claim earlier this month. “With the inflation data, I have a responsibility to 84m people,” he told the Turkish business newspaper Dunya. “If I sign off on an error, I will do an injustice to 84m people. As you know, millions of workers get a pay rise on the basis of the inflation that we announce. To tamper with those people’s incomes, to deprive them of their rights . . . I would not do that.” The agency is due to announce January’s inflation rate on February 3. Nureddin Nebati, the country’s finance minister, reportedly told a meeting of economists in Istanbul last weekend that he expected inflation to peak at 40 per cent in the months ahead.Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, forecasts annual consumer price inflation will have reached 48 per cent in January.Erdogan also accepted the resignation of his justice minister, Abdulhamit Gul, according to the official gazette. He replaced him with Bekir Bozdag, who has served two previous stints in the role. More

Thursday’s EU challenge accuses China of discriminatory trade practices against Lithuania, saying they threatened the integrity of the single market.”Australia has a substantial interest in the issues raised in the dispute brought by the European Union against China … and will request to join these consultations,” Trade Minister Dan Tehan said in a statement. China, which regards self-governed Taiwan as its own territory, has downgraded ties with Lithuania and pushed firms to sever links with the Baltic nation of 2.8 million people after it allowed Taiwan to open a de facto embassy in Vilnius. [L8N2U71GE]Its strictures include a refusal to clear Lithuanian goods through Chinese customs, rejection of import applications from Lithuania and pressure on EU firms to remove Lithuanian content from supply chains when exporting to China. Relations between Australia and China, its top trade partner, soured after Canberra banned Huawei Technologies from its 5G broadband network in 2018, toughened laws against foreign political interference, and urged an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.Beijing responded by freezing ministerial contacts and imposing tariffs on several Australian commodities, such as coal, beef, barley and wine.Australia has filed two WTO complaints in the past 18 months over China’s duties on imports of bottled wine and barley.In a statement on Saturday, the foreign ministry said Australia “welcomes” an invitation from France to take part in a February meeting of Indo-Pacific foreign ministers.”Australia greatly values cooperation with France and with Europe, including in the Indo-Pacific,” it said in an e-mailed statement, without saying if Foreign Minister Marise Payne would attend. Australia’s relations with France, which holds the rotating six-month presidency of the EU Council, have also soured after Canberra signed a security pact last year with Britain and the United States, dubbed AUKUS, scrapping a multi-billion-dollar submarine deal with France. The pact, widely viewed as an attempt to shore up regional military muscle in the face of China’s growing presence, riled Beijing, but also caused fury in France. More