Guaido
© AFPPretender Juan Guaido
Majority of the IMF executive committee members failed to recognize Juan Guaido as "interim president" of Venezuela.

The director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, said Saturday that majority of the organization's executive committee members have failed to recognize opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido as the "interim president" of Venezuela.

"It has to be a large majority of the membership actually recognizing diplomatically the authorities that they regard as legitimate," Lagarde said in a press conference at the IMF and World Bank spring meetings in Washington.

This sets back the effort of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin who said Saturday that he had had discussions with the IMF about the process for recognizing Guaido as Venezuela's leader. "There were discussions we had this week at the IMF about that, and what their process would be to do that," he said.

The IMF, based in Washington is one of the instruments used by the United States President Donald Trump's administration to attack the Venezuelan economy with the aim of destabilizing the government of Nicolas Maduro. On April 11, the agency suspended access of the Venezuelan government to US$400 million of special drawing rights (SDR), a fund that every country in the world is entitled to.

A day earlier, on April 10 during a meeting of U.N. Security Council, the ambassador of Venezuela to the United Nations Samuel Moncada denounced that the U.S. intends to indebt the South American country before the IMF.

"Our refineries' profits are being used to pay debts to Trump administration-friendly oil companies. His friends, who hold Venezuelan debt bonds, receive special licenses to collect profits from our people's stolen money," Moncada said adding that the U.S. officials have already announced a plan to indebt Venezuela for over US$70 billion."