August 2020

Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui, former PDVSA legal counsel and Rafael Ramirez confidant, handed himself over to the Feds.

Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui, former PDVSA legal counsel and Rafael Ramirez confidant, handed himself over to the Feds.

Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui, former PDVSA legal counsel and Rafael Ramirez confidant, handed himself over to the Feds.

AP reported the other day that Harvest Natural Resources had dropped its lawsuit against former PDVSA CEO and Minister of Energy Rafael Ramirez. No information about settlements was published. Then Harvest filed a form 8-K with the SEC, which reads:

Juan Guaido isn't very bright, that much is more than evident already. He's come up with a 'new roadmap', which is a consultation plan -with same useless politicos that have allowed Nicolas Maduro to lord over Venezuela, for a new plan, which will rehash / relaunch the old plan of "1) cese de la usurpacion, 2) gobierno de transición, 3) elecciones libres"... well, better to listen from the horse's mouth:

Hemos construido y vamos a exponer una hoja de ruta para enfrentar al fraude y salvar a Venezuela.

PDVSA, Venezuela's State-owned energy conglomerate, was taken over over by Hugo Chavez in 2002. Chavez realised early on that in order to succeed, his cosmic revolution would have to have unrestricted access to  unlimited funding. That is where Rafael Ramirez, the perfect yes-man, slotted right in. Upon being appointed by Chavez as both PDVSA CEO and Minister of Energy, he was in charge of supervising himself, i.e. Ramirez the Minister had to keep all activities of Ramirez the PDVSA CEO in check.

Switzerland is, of course, chock full of banks that have money laundering as an important revenue stream. Laundering proceeds of corruption has sustained many Swiss bankers over the years. But then, there are cases where aside from money laundering there's little else. We are of the opinion that Compagnie Bancaire Helvetique (CBH) is the perfect case exhibit to illustrate this point.

UPDATED 25/08/2020 - Sources have informed this site that Reliance may be lifting up to eight cargoes in August (four have already been lifted). When this site put the question to a senior official with the Trump administration, whether Reliance had obtained a waiver / OFAC license, reply was in the negative. Whatever the case, Nicolas Maduro has cracked it.

UPDATED 13/11/2020 - 06/09/2022 - In September 2013, this site wrote "...PDVSA assigned dollars to a foreign corporation and people wanting to offload Bolivares and get dollars were offered the scheme.

UPDATED - This site suffered the most relentless DDoS attack we've had to endure since we started reporting Venezuelan corruption issues in October 2002. Something must be happening somewhere, perhaps our investigations into PDVSA's sanctions-evasion antics and corresponding shipping data, which is quickly acted upon by our esteemed readers from U.S.

This site has been under a relentless DDoS attack since 17 July (peaking at over 25 million requests per second), apologies to our readers. While measures to mitigate it are taking place (not thanks to AWS, source of attacks), we have kept ourselves busy investigating corruption. In earlier posts, we exposed how Luis and Ignacio  Oberto, with the help of Alejandro Betancourt and Nervis Villalobos, set up a $4.5 billion money laundering scheme at PDVSA. Rafael Ramirez was central to it, and his approval was a must.