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PDVSA sources have informed this site that Tareck el Aissami, Venezuela's Oil Minister, has given specific instructions to eliminate all information about PDVSA's trading partners from its SAP system. A similar measure is to be implemented on PDVSA's crude lifting line up. According to sources, el Aissami is not quite happy with constant leaks that expose PDVSA's secrets, as posted in this site and others.

This week saw publication of in-depth reports (here, here and here) about Dan Gertler, a Treasury-santioned Israeli thug that became the go-to guy for all mining deals in

Features of modern life always get late to Venezuela. Investigative journalism was one of them. When we started learning the ropes and posting breaking stories about Venezuelan rampant corruption, in the early 2000s, nobody was publishing investigative journalism work in English online. Our first series, about propaganda outfit Venezuela Information Office, exposed Andres Izarra, Eva Golinger, Greg Wilpert, Mark Weisbrot, Code Pink, TransAfrica Forum, Michael Schellenberger and a whole bunch of psycophantic paid agents.

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.