n 2008, TI attracted controversy by claiming in a report entitled Promoting Revenue Transparency that Venezuela's state-owned oil firm PDVSA had failed to disclose basic financial information such as their revenues and how much royalties they paid, and had not produced properly audited accounts.[3] As a result, the report gave PDVSA the lowest possible ranking in assessing the oil companies in 42 different countries, and ranking them according to whether they were of high, medium or low transparency.[4]
In fact, the report was incorrect, and all the data was publicly available, leading to claims of a bias by TI against the Venezuelan government.
When questioned about the apparently biased report, TI initially claimed that information was not available at the time of publication – a claim which was also false - and then refused to answer further questions about the matter.
The data in TI's report was gathered by Mercedes de Freitas, the head of their Caracas bureau and a longtime opponent of President Hugo Chávez. De Freitas' previous job was running a US government funded opposition "civil society" group, the Fundacion Momento de la Gente, which is subsidized by National Endowment for Democracy, a US government agency.
Transparency international links with Venezuelan coup plotters
According to a report in the UK's Guardian newspaper, "TI's Venezuela bureau is staffed by opponents of the Venezuelan government. The directors include Robert Bottome, the publisher of Veneconomia, a strident opposition journal, and Aurelio Concheso of the Centre for the Dissemination of Economic Knowledge, a conservative think tank funded by the US government. Concheso was previously a director of the employers' organisation, Fedecamaras. The president of Fedecamaras, Pedro Carmona, led the failed 2002 coup and was briefly installed as Venezuela's dictator."
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Transparency_International#cite_note-2
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