Philipp
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Luis Alejandro Martínez Faneyth
<luis@huntingbears.com.ve <mailto:luis@huntingbears.com.ve>> wrote:
Hi Moray,
El 01/03/13 18:16, Moray Allan escribió:
DC14 bid teams,
How do you plan for money handling to work in your proposed
location?
For the USA, I assume the answer will be "use SPI", but feel free to
comment further.
For Venezuela, the bid page says, "Venezuela has a currency exchange
control. It is illegal for people to exchange dollars, euros,
other, for
bolívares (official currency), unless is done through official
institutions. In the past, the country had large losses of money
due to
the flight of capital. The government implemented a currency
exchange
control to protect the internal cashflow. This might become an
obstacle
in our logistic."
I don't think that having to exchange money through official
mechanisms
is a problem, it just means we need to make our plans using the
official
exchange rates.
But what are the controls on money entering and leaving the
country? Do
we need special permissions to send money into the country, and how
difficult is that/how long does it take?
For individuals, one can enter and leave the country with less than
$10,000 without having to declare such amount. Also, the use of
credit and debit cards is accepted globally (on mayor
stablishments). For things like buying souvenirs or eating on a
street stand or renting water motorcycles, people are going to need
Bolívares.
For international money transfers, the operation is a bit tricky. It
is permitted to have dollar accounts on venezuelan banks, but as
this was implemented recently, the conditions and requirements to
open this kind of accounts are not as clear as we would expect. A
legal entity should open the account, among some other tricky
requirements. After the account is set up, it can recieve money
transfers from outside, and then it can be cashed out in Bolívares
on a local bank. This is the only official way to introduce foreign
funds into the country. However, this is not a path we recommend to
follow.
There is another legal way. If the operation occurs in a country
where there is no currency exchange control, it would be ok. For
example, the local team can partner up with a local company (travel
agency, FOSS startup, ...) that has an account outside the country
to receive dollars and give us Bolívares in Venezuela (at official
rate).
And there is yet another legal way. Transfers can be made directly
to providers that have an account outside the country. For example,
The hotel we are proposing has accounts outside, and possible, the
tourist agency which would provide us with transport+food to the Day
Trip.
There's also to take into account the proportion of the budget that
can be covered through local sponsoring.
As discussed on [debian-ve], we would like to state that receiving
sponsoring from SPI is a matter that has to be managed with
anticipation and special attention. It is better for us to use SPI
sponsoring on specific things like the hotel or food providers payment.
What about getting money out
of the country -- what are the barriers to doing bank transfers to
transfer un-spent money (or profit from merchandise etc.) to another
country?
Getting money out of the country is very complicated, but not
impossible. It has to be done directly through CADIVI (official
currency exchange operator), or through representatives that make
the CADIVI procedure for us. One of the limitations is that CADIVI
only allows a maximum amount of 900USD to be transferred per month.
If it is to be done through a representative (most likely) they will
receive Bolívares and convert them to USD at the official rate (6,30).
Do you know of another international event which dealt with
these issues
which could tell us about their experiences?
Yes, Venezuela held the Fedora Developers Conference (FUDCON) last
year [0]. Its main organizer, Maria Leandro, has been a very
important source of information to start this phase of the bid process.
Basically, its the same working scenario. RedHat sponsored the major
part of the budget by paying directly to the hotel in Venezuela and
other stuff outside the country. It was a determinant aspect that
the hotel had an account outside the country. The rest of the budget
was sponsored locally.
[0] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/__FUDCon:Valencia_2012
<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Valencia_2012>
--
Luis Alejandro Martínez Faneyth
Blog: http://www.huntingbears.com.__ve/
<http://www.huntingbears.com.ve/>
Twitter/Identi.ca: @LuisAlejandro
ED51 8FE7 4107 715D 0464 8366 F614 5A95 E78D AA2E
CODE IS POETRY
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