Who is Dinosaur Merchant Bank?

While in book-writing mode I bumped again into Dinosaur Merchant Bank. It made a rather noisy entrance in 2017, when it intermediated in a transaction where Goldman Sachs bought $2.8 billion worth of Venezuela 2022 bonds on 31 cents on the dollar. I read about it in this affidavit (paragraph 83), in relation to a $100 million bond portfolio belonging to Wilmer Ruperti. Then, a while ago I received documents about an Italian company that seized a PDVSA cargo in Curaçao (subsequently auctioned), in which Dinosaur somehow inserted itself -along lawyers that work for Maduro and co. More recently, Panama's Banking Superintendent seems determined to pass to Dinosaur assets seized from Victor Vargas.

Roberto Javier Keeton is part of Dinosaur. Given that there are only three Keetons in Venezuela, I made some enquiries and were able to determine that Roberto is indeed son of Jerome (Jerry) Keeton, whom I happen to know personally. The Keetons are based in Merida, a city where I spent quite a lot of time in back in the day. There's one very powerful chavista that also hails from Merida: Tareck el Aissami.

Sources have informed this site that Victor Vargas's problems in Venezuela is that he misspent / misappropriated narcos' money. Hundreds of millions. Getting back some, in Panama, from a Superintendent that used to be Vargas' employee seems a viable enough possibility.

With all the chatter about an alleged super indictment in the works, which may target Tareck el Aissami, Nicolas Maduro, his immediate family, and other Bolivarian drug trafficking friends, feds and probing prosecutors should  look into Dinosaur's connections in Venezuela, and who, ultimately, connected this four-man operation to bond transactions, oil auctions and so on. Dinosaur seems to have an uncanny ability to gain business from chavistas and / or their associates. That does not happen without blessing from someone at the top (Tareck?), specially when it's a little firm, without significant revenue (aside from that coming from Venezuela) that hides its real owners behind shells in Delaware and Bermuda.