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11/20/2005:
"Chavez Mends US Safety Net: Thousands in Mass. to get cheaper oil"
A subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil company will ship 12 million gallons of discounted home-heating oil to local charities and 45,000 low-income families in Massachusetts next month under a deal arranged by US Representative William D. Delahunt, a local nonprofit energy corporation, and Venezuela's president, White House critic Hugo Chávez.The approximately $9 million deal will bring nine million gallons of oil to families and three million gallons to institutions that serve the poor, such as homeless shelters, said officials from Citizens Energy Corp., which is signing the contract. Families would pay about $276 for a 200-gallon shipment, a savings of about $184 and enough to last about three weeks.
The contract is to be signed Tuesday by officials from Citizens Energy, based in Boston, and CITGO, a Houston-based subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela SA. The contract was arranged after months of talks between Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat active in Latin American affairs, and Chávez, a leftist former paratrooper and fierce critic of the Bush administration.
''We recognized that we had an opportunity," Delahunt's spokesman, Steve Schwadron, said yesterday.
Chávez showed ''an inclination to do a humanitarian distribution" of oil, and poor families in Massachusetts had a ''desperate need" for relief from high home-heating prices, Schwadron said. He characterized the deal as one between ''a US company and two nonprofits to help them do more of what they already do, with terms that mean the price is good."
...'Fuel assistance is woefully underfunded, so this is a major shot in the arm for people who otherwise wouldn't get through the winter," Chretien said. He said he hoped the deal would present ''a friendly challenge" to US oil companies -- which recently reported record quarterly profits -- to use their windfall to help poor families survive the winter.
boston.com
