Chavez to nationalize Venezuelan gold industry

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela will nationalize its gold industry and is moving its international reserves out of Western nations, President Hugo Chavez said on Wednesday in a combative step ahead of his re-election bid next year.

The moves will make the finances of South America's biggest oil exporter even murkier as the 57-year-old socialist leader gears up for an election battle that was looking increasingly close even before he was recently diagnosed with cancer.

Chavez has put large parts of Venezuela's economy under state control and is now targeting the gold industry after his government quarrelled with foreign companies who complained that limits on how much gold they could export hurt their efforts to secure financing and develop projects.

Chavez seems to have lost patience and decided to put the whole industry into state hands.

"We're going to nationalize the gold and we're going to convert it, among other things, into international reserves because gold continues to increase in value," the authoritarian but charismatic president said in a phone call to state TV.

"I'm going to approve a law to begin taking the gold areas, and there I count on (the military) because there continues to be anarchy, mafias, smuggling," he said.

Toronto-listed Rusoro, owned by Russia's Agapov family, is the only large gold miner operating in Venezuela. It produced about 100,000 ounces of gold in Venezuela last year.

The nationalization of the gold industry fits with Chavez's broader plan to repatriate his country's bullion and shift most of its cash reserves out of Western nations to political allies including China, Russia and Brazil.

"President Chavez told us some time ago to diversify ... and what we're seeing now is nothing more than the consequence of a policy that has been firming up over time," Finance Minister Jorge Giordani said on Wednesday.

"It is a question of prudence and protection.

Chavez, who has undergone two sessions of chemotherapy in Cuba since he announced in June that he had cancer, has often railed against Venezuela's reliance on the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency of choice.

WORRIED ABOUT SANCTIONS?

Giordani said the move was under way, and that mounting debt worries in Europe and the United States showed that Venezuela needed to diversify where it kept its reserves.

Some critics have suggested that Chavez might be worried about the possibility of sanctions against his government if there is violence in next year's election campaign and so is trying to ensure that state reserves are stored more safely.

The former soldier appeared to allude to the possibility of reserves being seized by foreign powers.

"Look what's happening in the Arab world with the use of international reserves ... (there is) practically a confiscation of those resources, which is something we have to prevent at any cost, linking our economies to the BRIC nations and South Africa," Chavez said on Wednesday when he called into a news conference by his finance minister.

Venezuela has total international reserves of $29.1 billion (17.5 billion pounds). About 63 percent of that is in gold worth $11 billion held overseas and $7 billion at home, the government says.

One way it could boost its bullion reserves was to nationalize the gold industry, which had largely stagnated.

Venezuela has been relatively small in the gold world, with formal mining producing just 4.3 tonnes a year. But it boasts some of Latin America's biggest gold deposits, buried below the jungles south of the Orinoco river.

Chavez agreed last year to let gold miners export up to 50 percent of production, from 30 percent previously. The other 50 percent must be sold to the central bank.

But that did not satisfy foreign companies like Rusoro, which said the limits made it much harder for them to get financing abroad, develop projects and create jobs.

One victim of the dispute has been a huge but long-troubled project called Las Cristinas. It has been in limbo since the government cancelled a development licence with another Canadian miner, Crystallex, in February.

Rusoro had expressed interest in Las Cristinas, which has not been developed since the 1980s but has reserves estimated at 17 million ounces. Locals once found a 1-kilo (2.2-lb) nugget there. But Rusoro's chief executive told Reuters in June it could not take on the project unless the government scrapped its export rules.

Sources at Rusoro said it planned to respond in coming days to Chavez's decision to nationalize the industry.

(Additional reporting by Eyanir Chinea and Diego Ore; Editing by Kieran Murray)