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Good old Setty tweeted the other day about Doing Business in Venezuela. According to its mission, Doing Business is a "project [that] provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 189 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level." Doing Business ranks Venezuela in 181 place, out of 189 economies measured. That is, according to Doing Business there's only 8 other economies in the world where, overall, doing business is worse in every measurable aspect than in Venezuela.

Last Friday, the new board of Cadena Capriles, a media conglomerate that owns among other things Venezuela's largest newspaper, announced that a company called Latam Media Holding had recently acquired Cadena Capriles. The announcement came on the back of a previous one, made roughly five months ago by former CEO and owner Miguel Angel Capriles Lopez (a.k.a. "Michu"), claiming that the group of companies had been sold.

Countless words have been printed in the last few days about Angela Merkel's reaction to the news that the US government bugged her phone, and President Obama having even been briefed about in 2010 and doing nothing to "halt the operation" by the NSA. In this post Wikileaks and Snowden era we live in, that ever so defining and most useful of politicians' treats -hypocrisy- no longer cuts mustard. For Merkel's "outrage" is just that: utter hypocrisy. To illustrate the point, I shall provide an example that may have escaped Frau Merkel's "public indignation" radar.

I get my F1 news mainly from Joe Saward. His report of the last grand prix from Suzuka almost made me choke, because of this claim regarding Williams F1 Team and PDVSA...

Public companies trade on their earnings, management team, and in great part on their name. How the market perceives a company has the most impact on stock price. It follows that multinational corporations apportion considerate amount of resources to PR and brand-reputation protection. Wall Street history is littered with examples of what happens to a stock’s price when a company becomes embroiled in scandals, corporate malfeasance, or fraud.

The BBC reported it as "Police at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport have seized 1.3 tonnes of pure cocaine on board an Air France flight from Venezuela, French officials say." For Venezuela observers this is nothing new. What's surprising about it, is how Venezuela's "CSIRT" is trying to block information about those believed to be responsible. See below.

Been trying to get a clearer picture of the involvement of JP Morgan in laundering millions of dollars siphoned out of Venezuela by Derwick Associates. A source recently pointed me in the right direction, and so I found in New York property records' database documents that demonstrate, beyond reasonable doubt, that JP Morgan bankers purchased property -as proxies- on behalf of Derwick Associates, while it also granted a $5.8 million mortgage on said property.

Luis Oberto (aka Luis Alfonso Oberto Anselmi) one of the most discreet members of the Venezuelan Boliburgeoisie. A mention here, another there, it seems that Oberto has been able to fly under the radar for quite some time now, although INFODIO readers -an extraordinary source of information on all these white-collar thugs- have been sharing intel on Oberto and his operations. Please bear with me as this is about to get more complicated than a Venezuelan soap opera.