This really happened?
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.
''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."
Delahunt was not available for comment yesterday.
Schwadron said the congressman did not get involved in the details of the contract, but had raised the issue with Chávez and helped connect the nonprofits with CITGO, which is owned by PDV America Inc., an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela SA, the national oil company of Venezuela.
......Kennedy said he was not concerned about Chávez's politics.
''You start parsing which countries' politics we're going to feel comfortable with, and only buying oil from them, then there are going to be a lot of people not driving their cars and not staying warm this winter," Kennedy said. ''There are a lot of countries that have much worse records than Venezuela. At the end of the day it's not our business to go choosing other peoples' leaders, particularly when they are duly-elected democratic leaders."....***