Venezuela has ordered BP, Exxon and other oil and gas majors to hand back the majority rights to a massive $30 billion-worth (£15 billion) of crude projects in the country.

President Hugo Chavez announced the May Day takeover this morning as part of radical step up in his self-styled leftist revolution.

He also revealed Venezuela would pull out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “We will no longer have to go to Washington nor to the IMF, nor to the World Bank, not to anyone,” he said.

The huge heavy crude development spread across four projects in the Orinoco Belt region is valued at more than $30 billion and can convert about 600,000 barrels a day of heavy crude into synthetic oil.

BP, the US companies ConocoPhilips, Chevron and Exxon along with France’s Total and Norway’s Statoil have agreed formally to transfer operational control. They will retain minority stakes.

Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA was already a partner in all four of the projects.

BP produces only around 26,000 barrels a day from its interest in the Exxon-operated Cerro Negro field in the Orinoco Belt. Its global output is nearly 4 million.

But the company has been exploring in Venezuela for a decade. On its website, it describes the country as a “land of great potential”.

A BP spokesman today said: “We continue to be in discussions with the Venezuelan ministry and PDVSA regarding other commercial matters.”

The company and its rivals are expected to be compensated for the transfer, allthough Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s Oil Minister, has cautioned that he will consider agreements only on the booked value of the projects rather than their much larger current net worth.

Workers celebrated the takeover in Puerto Piritu, a town near the facilities that refine crude from the Orinoco Belt, waving Venezuelan red, blue and yellow flags.

Mr Chavez, a fierce anti-US leader, is also nationalising power utilities and the country’s biggest telecoms firm.

The move comes a year after the Bolivian president Evo Morales, a leftist ally of Mr Chavez, ordered troops to seize his country’s gas fields.

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