OREANDA-NEWS. The Central Bank of Venezuela and the country's banking sector institutions management (SUDEBAN) decided to develop their own payment system and refuse by the end of January agreements with the Visa, Mastercard and Maestro franchises, the country's news portal reported.

From November 30, 2019, operations on debit cards of these systems should be terminated, and from January 30, 2020, on credit. SUDEBAN has instructed financial institutions to create an independent payment system in the light of recent US sanctions against Venezuela and new threats. Banks must develop a "sovereign" system for processing debit and credit transactions of customers through the use of biometric identification. Meanwhile, experts interviewed by the portal consider it unlikely that such a system could be created in a short time.

Earlier, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that his country is freed from the dollar, although the financial authorities of Venezuela recently, on the contrary, almost completely liberalized his appeal. In fact, the dollarization of the Venezuelan economy has been going on all the past months - since the moment of official permission for foreign currency turnover. US sanctions against Venezuela have been in effect since March 2015, when President Barack Obama introduced them against a number of Venezuelan officials in response to the expulsion of American diplomats from the country. Since then, sanctions have been repeatedly extended. The United States recently tightened a number of sanctions against Venezuela, including against state-owned companies. Washington January 28 announced the introduction of sanctions against the national oil and gas company PDVSA.

According to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it was the “Russians” (without specifying positions and departmental affiliation) that Nicolas Maduro was allegedly dissuaded from fleeing from Venezuela.