Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is slamming Whitehall for its “laughable” claim that the National Assembly, which was elected in 2015, is the Caribbean country’s only legitimate institution.
“It is laughable and ridiculous that at this point, they still resort to this farce and falsehood,” Maduro said Thursday in his annual message to the Venezuelan legislature.
Earlier on Thursday, Britain’s Foreign Office issued a statement reiterating it continues to “consider the National Assembly elected in 2015 as the last democratically elected National Assembly in Venezuela” after that group voted to dissolve the supposed ‘interim presidency’ of Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaido.
“The UK continues not to accept the legitimacy of the administration put in place by Nicolás Maduro,” it wrote.
Maduro dismissed that 2015 legislature – whose five-year mandate to legislate legally expired in 2020 – as little more than a cat’s paw in a Western-backed plot to “recolonize Venezuela.”
“The only exclusive and determining legislative body is the National Assembly elected by the people in 2020,” Maduro noted.
“Everything else is a farce mounted as part of a political, economic, financial, energy, and diplomatic aggression,” Maduro told lawmakers Thursday.
“We have been able to confront it and in 2023, we will have defeated it.”
London’s refusal to recognize the Venezuelan government could impact the ongoing UK-based court case determining whether the Bank of England will be forced to return over a billion dollars worth of gold to the Caribbean country.
Since 2020, the bank has refused to relinquish 32 tons of Venezuelan gold – valued at roughly $1.7 billion – to the Maduro administration, citing the British government’s decision to recognize Guaido rather than its elected leader.