Last week, the de facto Attorney General Tarek William Saab, announced the arrest of Carlos Marrón Colmenares, businessman and owner of the extinct website webdolarpro.com, for engaging in "financial terrorism", offering reference quotes on the "black market" dollar. This detention was carried out in an irregular manner, with accusations of simulation of kidnapping by members of the Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) to the father of said businessman. More details about this fact and video of the kidnapping can be seen in this post.

What draws the attention, is that this is the first case of relevance that an arrest happens for this type of "crimes". In this post, I want to give my impressions about the reason why this arrest was made, besides talking a bit about the behavior of "illegal" pages that give the black market exchange rates.

1. The government of Maduro understood as a priority the assimilation of foreign exchange proceeds from family remittances: On January 5, the Venezuelan Government announced the activation of the new Complementary Foreign Exchange System (DICOM). One of the most relevant news of this announcement is that it was that it would allow "accepting international remittances." Although there are no official figures regarding how many dollars are paid monthly for this concept, I allow myself to make this not so far-fetched calculation, taking into account the following data:

• 3,000,000 Venezuelans left the country since this crisis worsened. 50% of these migrants (1,500,000) are active labor population.

• Each migrant sends, at least, $100 per month to their relatives in Venezuela.

So, taking into account these data, at least $150,000,000 per month enter Venezuela for this concept. Yearly, they would be at least 1.8 Billion dollars, approx. 20% of the international reserves of the Central Bank of Venezuela.

Hence the importance of Maduro's announcement.

1. The pre-sale/ICO of the Petro (PTR). On December 3, 2017 Nicolás Maduro announced the creation of Petro, a cryptocurrency backed by Venezuela's oil reserves. This announcement raised the issuance of one hundred million petro (100,000,000 PTR) at a rate related to the price of a barrel of crude oil, at $60 per barrel. This announcement led to a clarification by the US Government, through the Treasury Department, that due to the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela, warned US investors that the use of Petro could cause legal problems.

So, Venezuela has 100,000,000 PTR, valued at $ 6,000,000,000 that needed a buyer.

Before going to the third point, take into account these two dates:

• February 20, 2018: Start of Petro presale.

• March 20, 2018: Petro ICO Starts.

1. The behavior of the Dolar Today exchange rate in February-March. "Dolar Today", website that was reference of the "black market" dollar in Venezuela, and object of numerous attacks on the part of the Venezuelan government, showed a behavior in its price index from February 20 that was different from that of currency exchange services, like AirTM, who took the exchange rate 10-15% below Dolar Today, referring to many users who exchange currencies in Venezuela.

I want to share this chart made by me, taking into account the historical index of the black market dollar on the Dolar Today website, and the daily dollar rates published in the AirTM Twitter account:

As can be seen in the chart above, between February 20th, the date that matches with the pre-sale of the Petro, and March 20th, date of the Petro ICO, the behavior of exchange rates begin to differ markedly. There is a growing trend in the AirTM index. On the other hand, theDolar Today rate is down 15% to a minimum in the middle of that period, to recover the value on March 20 to a value similar to that of the 20th day of the previous month. Already by March 20th, the AirTM index exceeds that of Dolar Today, a difference that widens in the following days.

What produced that?

The AirTM team explained the phenomenon in its Twitter account:

RATE IN AIRTM: Due to the increase of mentions and doubts regarding the exchange rate in AirTM, we believe it is important to be totally transparent in how it is calculated.

The goal of AirTM is to maximize the deposit and withdrawal transactions that are completed on the platform. To do that, exchange rates have to be as close as possible to the fair market rate. That is, at the rate where any person is willing to buy or sell a dollar. A few months ago, the AirTM rate was influenced by Dolar Today, the then market benchmark.

However, little by little the users stopped accepting the price of the reference. In order for the market to continue to flow, we were forced to adjust the price little by little, trying to find the price at which users do sell their dollars, the fair market price. In summary, we have decided to make our foreign exchange rate independent from any external agency that may have hidden motives and to find our own exchange rate taking as a reference the market of dollars in AirTM that today exceeds 600 billion bolivars every week .

In other words, AirTM made the decision to follow the rules of the free market, and to adjust the exchange rates independently of the dollar exchange rate, which was followed by the rest of the pages that published the parallel dollar rate, among them Web Dolar Pro, whose owner was arrested, as we said at the beginning of the article.

Conclusions

a. The Venezuelan Government wanted to force a low price Dollar through the DICOM. The new DICOM, intended to acquire dollars at low prices to encourage nationals to purchase the Petro, without success, since they were limited to the purchase of said cryptocurrency by the sanctions imposed by the US Department of the Treasury.

b. Dolar Today manipulated the price of the Parallel Dollar. During the period from 20-Feb to 20-Mar, coinciding with the period of the Petro pre-sale, Dolar Today decreased the exchange rate by up to 15%, citing the sale of dollars for the payment of Income Tax (ISLR) in Bs., when the market dynamics indicated otherwise.

c. Dolar Today is controlled by agents related to the Venezuelan Government. By failing to obtain the expected results because of the US sanctions and the low income of dollars through the DICOM, government-related agents who handle Dolar Today manipulated the parallel rate to acquire USD at prices lower than the market price to finance the presale of the Petro (PTR). This at the expense of the retail market, made up of common individuals who receive remittances from abroad. Remember, the income to the nation of foreign currency through family remittances is at least USD 1.8 Billion, 30% of what is necessary to complete Petro's demand (30,000,000 PTR) that will be issued.

d. The Failure of Dolar Today produced the hyperinflationary explosion at the beginning of April and the capture of Carlos Marrón. As of today, currency exchange web services are publishing a price of Bs. 700,000.00 per USD. The control that was intended to be set during the month of March failed by dramatically decrease the supply of dollars, trying to maintain a stable exchange rate when the inflation rate continued to increase. As a consequence, the government mafias carried out the capture of Carlos Marrón, under the irregularities previously exposed.

I hope this information will be of great help to understand the behavior of the parallel dollar index and how the Venezuelan government uses well-known strategies of Cuban Castrismo, to benefit from the remittances that family members who emigrated abroad to get better living conditions, because of the economic situation that this same Government produced.

It is our duty to exercise critical thinking, reach the truth and spread it. If you agree, I invite you to share this post. We are going to warn the Americas of what can happen if we do not have a firm stance towards socialism in the hemisphere.

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