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The U.S. Department of the Treasury (bless them) issued fresh sanctions against PDVSA last Friday. A number of tug boats (34) and one oil tanker were added to the list. Targeting the parasitic Cuban dictatorship is paramount to bring an end to chavismo in Venezuela, and there is no better way than disrupting, or altogether stopping, continued transfer of oil to Raul Castro.

$1,305,592,000,000 (please have this number in mind -one trillion, three hundred and five billion, five hundred and ninety-two million dollars- as you read through). Two very charitable chaps from Cleary Gottlieb, Richard J. Cooper and Mark A. Walker, have published a paper on Venezuela's debt, entitled "Venezuela's Restructuring: A Path Forward" (see below with added comments). It is work that shows the kinds of problems a future administration will have to deal with ($191.4 billion debt) in terms of pleasing the country's creditors.

Silvain Besson reported yesterday in the Tribune of Geneva that Helsinge -the shell controlled by Francisco Morillo, Leonardo Baquero and Daniel Lutz- has been charged by Geneva prosecutor Johan Droz with corruption, money laundering and data theft.

Depending on where people stand in the political sphere, there's never a shortage of villains. In the UK, at this point in time, there's almost universal consensus about number 10's current resident. The fact that a fanboy of Castro and Chavez stands across the aisle shows just how debased politics can become, even in very advanced democracies. What hope then, for a banana republic like Venezuela?

A PDVSA source recently shared some puzzling information about operations of Petrozamora, a joint venture between Corporación Venezolana de Petróleo (CVP) and Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V., an Amsterdam shell controlled by Boris Ivanov, Christophe Gerard, Francisco Convit and Orlando Alvarado.

Further to recent sanction to Evrofinance Mosnarbank by U.S. Treasury, PDVSA sources report of a scheme involving Petrozamora (see Gazprombank Latinamerica Ventures - GLV), PDVSA, Nynas, and VTB Bank (shareholder in Evrofinance). Petrozamora crude is lifted from Puerto Miranda (Maracaibo Lake) and sent onto Punto Fijo terminals where larger tanker ships bound to Nynäshamn refinery in Sweden load.

[UPDATED* PLEASE READ BELOW] On 3 January, Deacon Jorge Sonnante got in touch via DM. He sent me a link to a post about Pope Francis' alleged corruption, with a note asking whether I could help in making it viral. As a Venezuelan, I am naturally predisposed against authoritarianism, and in that regard Pope Francis is most certainly no John Paul II.

U.S. Treasury, bless them, issued another Venezuela-related sanction today against Evrofinance Mosnarbank. That's great news, cause Evrofinance is 49.9% owned by FONDEN, one of chavismo's favourite slush funds, from which billions have been misappropriated. Evrofinance is also interesting because other shareholders are Gazprombank, and VTB Bank, two Russian entities that had already been sanctioned under Ukraine-related Treasury santions against Putin's annexation of Crimea.