London, May 2:

Thousands of Venezualan workers took control of foreign-owned oil fields yesterday as Hugo havez stepped up his battle with Washington in a new wave of nationalisation and an nnouncement that the country was leaving the World Bank (WB) and the International onetary Fund (IMF).

Amid jubilant scenes, oil workers wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with ‘yes to ationalisation’ oved into the giant Orinoco basin shortly after midnight after Caracas insisted six of the orld’s biggest oil companies cede operational control.

Three US companies — ConocoPhillips, Chevron and Exxon Mobil, together with BP, Norway’s Statoil and France’s Total agreed to transfer operational control to state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela. In carefully-orchestrated moves designed to inflame concerns in the Bush administration about the new wave of left-wing populism in Latin America, the oil giants have been forced to accept a minority stake in joint ventures after Chavez said he was ending an era of US-prescribed policies designed to open Venezuela’s oil industry to foreign investment.

“President Chavez has ordered us to take full control over the sovereignty of our oil, and we are doing that today,” Venezuela’s oil minister Rafael Ramirez told state television at the oil installations shortly after midnight. In this very instant our oil workers are taking control of each of the areas of each of the installations.” The Orinoco Basin, 370 miles long and 43 miles wide, stretches along the Orinoco river in eastern Venezuela and is believed to hold the world’s largest crude reserves. Venezuela says it could hold as much as 370 billion barrels, compared with the country’s current oil reserves of about 80 billion barrels.

Chavez followed up the move with a strong attack on the Washington-based Bank and Fund, accusing them of exploiting small countries. The two organisations were “mechanisms of North American imperialism”, he said.

After using oil receipts to pay off $3 billion to the international financial institutions last month, Chavez said he wanted to ‘formalise’ his country’s exit from the Bank and Fund. “We are going to withdraw and let them pay back what they took from us,” he said, claiming the organisations were ‘in crisis’. Chavez is keen for Latin America to loosen their ties with the US by setting up a Banco del Sur (Bank of the South), to replace the WB and the IMF.

A spokesman for the IMF said that it had not been formally notified of Venezuela’s decision to withdraw, but the IMF’s deputy managing director, Murilo Portugal said he regretted the decision.

“It’s a member that’s been in the IMF for a long period, it’s an important country,’’ Portugal aid, “It’s their decision. We would regret it a lot.”