Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced that his socialist country has received $5 billion in financing from China.

Maduro said on Sunday that the money was intended for "development," but offered no further details.

As reported in the BBC, the announcement that the Latin American country will receive funds from the communist power comes three months after Maduro traveled to China, which is a major investor in the region.

Currently Venezuela is going through a profound economic crisis. This is due mainly to the fact that the price of oil, its main export, has almost halved over the course of a year. The right wing opposition party accuses the government of mismanagement.

Maduro visited Beijing in January and at the time, after meeting with the Chinese President Xi Jinping, he announced that Venezuela would receive $20 billion.

As reported in The Guardian, Maduro said: “We rounded up more than $20 billion in investment.”

The Venezuelan leader, who recently spent much time trying to gather millions of anti-Obama signatures intending to personally hand them to the U.S. President at the Summit of the Americas, did not say if the $5 billion from China was only part of a larger sum.

According to estimates published by the China-Latin America Finance Database, the number of loans backed by China's state-owned banks and offered to Latin American countries rose by 71 percent in 2014, and the amount lent had risen to $22 billion.

Information provided by the the database suggests that Chinese loans exceed the combined worth of those backed by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Financial figures offered from Venezuela's oil ministry indicate that the price of Venezuelan oil has dropped from $97 in April 2014 down to $50 this month.

In 2014, Inflation in the country stood at more than 60 percent.