Venezuela inspects prices in shops after currency reconversion

Government Venezuelan launched a deployment throughout the country to inspect the expression of prices in stores after the currency reconversion that took effect this Friday and eliminated six zeros from the currency, Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez reported this Saturday.

“It is a great deployment instructed by President Nicolás Maduro at the national level. We are inspecting that all businesses, nationwide, are expressing prices in the new monetary expression. (With) the removal of the six zeros, every price is divided by one million, ”Rodríguez told the Venezuelan state television channel (VTV).

The currency reconversion that came into effect this Friday is the third so far this century and meant that the currency became known as the digital bolivar.

Despite its name, the new coin will feature 25 and 50 cent coins, as well as a digital bolivar; in addition to bills of five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred.

Due to the fragility of the currency, previously called the sovereign bolivar, and its low purchasing power, it was replaced in most transactions by the dollar.

If you wanted to pay in bolivars, most businesses applied a parallel exchange rate and not that of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV).

In this sense, Rodríguez explained today that the most relevant aspect “in the inspection they are carrying out is that” the benchmark for the currency is the BCV rate.

The vice president assured that “only a few businesses” of those she visited had the parallel dollar indicator in what she described as “a war mark.”

The latest exchange rate published by the BCV is 4.18 bolivars for every dollar, while that of the “In parallel Venezuela” portal, which averages seven exchange houses, is 5.14.