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The Wall Street Journal was the first to report, in August 2014, on prosecutors from the Southern District of New York probing Venezuela's rampant corruption.

More on Derwick Oil & Gas. A document leaked to this site shows that Derwick Oil & Gas (the "Creditor"), a Barbados co owned and managed by Alejandro Betancourt and Francisco Convit, committed to give a $35 million loan to Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V. (the "Borrower"), a joint venture between Derwick and GPB Global Resources B.V., in turn a fully owned Gazprom subsidiary.

This post, intended for this site, originally appeared in my blog due to crippling DDoS attack. Do read updates about Rosneft at end of post. It was busy last week. As I was chatting to a source in Caracas last Monday, I noticed that this site was down.

UPDATED - Before getting to Fusion GPS associations to Venezuela, let me just say that that country is, by far, Latin America's most corrupt. Its president, Nicolas Maduro, has the unique distinction of being the "individual who has done the most in the world to advance organized criminal activity and corruption" according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

For the past three/four weeks I’ve noticed a spike in Google searches for corruption-related Venezuelan names and PDVSA. Some of the world’s biggest and best known banks and accounting firms seem all too keen, suddenly, of finding out what’s going in Venezuela. It could well be related to PDVSA’s announcement of a $7 billion bond swap. But it could also be due to some persistent rumours about impending legal cases against PDVSA that could all but obliterate the company’s ability to meet its current international financial obligations, let alone future ones.

So called disruptive technologies have entered common language. Loads of enthusiastic people keep saying that this or that new thing will "change the world." Bitcoin, and its associated blockchain technology, was meant to do away with centralized control of money flows.