Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has threatened to imprison senior managers of the local Heinz subsidiary for "sabotaging the national economy.”
After receiving complaints from Heinz workers the company was creating artificial shortages, Maduro made the warning during a television program on Tuesday night.
“I believe in the working class and I think that those workers are telling the truth,” Maduro said.
“Enough of this bourgeoisie. They ran out of time, bourgeois parasites," said the President, adding that “they close their doors to people to make them suffer under the sun.”
In February, Venezuela arrested the owners of a local food retailer. Maduro accused them of creating queues to whip up anger against his socialist government. "We detected that a famous chain of stores was conspiring, irritating the people. We came, we normalized sales, we summoned the owners, we arrested them and they're prisoners for having provoked the people,” he said at the time.
Venezuela is going to have crucial parliamentary elections on Sunday. Some polls suggest that Maduro's party could lose.
The IMF projected that Venezuela will experience a deep recession in 2015 and 2016. GDP is expected to contract about 10 percent in 2015, and inflation is seen hitting 159 percent at the same time.