AFP, Caracas :
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ordered banks to adopt the petro cryptocurrency as a unit of account Monday, as the country struggles to emerge from a severe political and economic crisis.
Public and private banks must now reflect all financial information in bolivars and petros, according to a resolution of the Sudeban banking regulator.
The move is part of Maduro’s desperate attempts to steer out of five years of recession and inflation the International Monetary Fund predicts will reach one million percent this year. More than two million people have fled the country in the wake of the crisis. Venezuela has also drastically devalued the bolivar currency, issued banknotes stripped of five zeroes in new “sovereign bolivars.” The economic plan also includes a 3,400 percent increase in the minimum wage and a hike in gasoline taxes, which for years have been the world’s cheapest.
The socialist president, elected for another six-year term in May elections rejected by much of the international community as fraudulent, has fixed the currency to the country’s widely-discredited cryptocurrency, the petro, which is in turn linked to the price of a barrel of Venezuelan oil (about $60).
