June 2020

Joshua Goodman has a piece about Wilmer Ruperti. In short, a cargo of gasoline was to be loaded onto Alkimos vessel in Cristobal (Panama), to be delivered to Aruba, where it was due to be ship-to-ship transfered to Beauty One, a vessel used by PDVSA for cabotage. Ruperti must've thought the Alkimos could just transfer load and that would be the end of it. Given that sanctions were already in place, parties controlling Alkimos got scared and set sail for the Gulf Coast, where a court is about to auction its cargo.

There's been persistent chatter in the last few days about secret talks in Caracas between Donald Trump's envoys and Nicolas Maduro, aimed at easing Maduro from power. Former union boss Carlos Ortega even said it was a done deal. The sanctions regime imposed by U.S. Treasury on Venezuela / PDVSA is causing huge cash flow problem for Maduro and co.

Something quite extraordinary happened upon arrest of Alex Saab in Cape Verde: all the shells that had been lifting most of PDVSA crude (Libre Abordo, Proton SL, Schlager Business Group, Delta LLC) disappeared suddenly from shipping schedules. That tells the crucial role that Saab has in keeping PDVSA trading running. But Spain's Repsol and Italy's ENI, which in turn had nearly disappeared when Saab took over from Rosneft, are increasing their lifting activities.

In recent days Citizens Lab published a report on Dark Basin, described as a "Massive Hack-For-Hire Operation". It's one of those interesting reads to keep up with techniques employed by criminal elements against journalists posting inconvenient truths.

On 12 June, Alex Saab was arrested in Cape Verde on an INTERPOL notice. Upon Saab's arrest, Venezuela's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jorge Arreaza, revealed that Saab was not only a Venezuelan citizen but an agent of Nicolas Maduro's regime travelling on official affairs, therefore protected by diplomatic immunity.

Jose Ignacio Hernandez, the heavily conflicted "Procurador" of Juan Guaido, resigned yesterday. Hernandez's resignation letter is a study in dishonesty. No mention was made about work done for Crystallex and in case of PDVSA US Litigation Trust against Helsinge, Trafigura, Glencore et al. Hernandez should have never been appointed to that position, should have never been given access to critical information which will, very likely, end up with Hernandez's past clients.

In late April, we were arguing about Alex Saab's role in Libre Abordo and latter's activities in becoming global standard in avoidance of Treasury sanctions:

PDVSA has ceased its trading operations almost completely, owing mainly to "bankruptcy" of Libre Abordo and arrest in Cape Verde of Alex Saab, PDVSA's de facto largest trader. Latest data from June shows ENI (Delta Captain, Delta Tolmi) and Repsol (Delta Med, Delta Angelica) are due to lift Merey cargoes. 3.6 MB altogether. That's it. There's no one else.

There's been frantic commentary over the weekend due to arrest last Friday of Alex Saab (Nicolas Maduro's favourite operator) in Cape Verde. Colombia moved last week against Saab, seizing and freezing some of his assets and placing him on INTERPOL's blue notice list. But this is Cape Verde, and Alex Saab, so alleged expedite extradition to face U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) charges was never going to be a straighforward affair. As of this writing, Saab is still in Cape Verde, not going anywhere in a hurry.

An email from rafael@rojorojito.org yesterday brought into focus Harvest Natural Resources lawsuit against Rafael Ramirez. Ramirez emailed his followers an update, claiming "U.S. court sentence against Rafael Ramirez reversed", which is a spectacularly fake bit of news.