pdvsa

Followers of the chavista disaster will remember when they told us that Iran was there, "to fix refineries", that Russia was there, "to increase output", that China was there, in an equal partnership of two nations that had decided that the best way forward was "to carve their own independent paths away from U.S. Imperialism". After each vacuous announcement, PDVSA's production was going to be propelled to 5 million, to 6 million, to X million, which coincide quite closely with the numbers that PDVSA would be producing today with its old partners had chavismo not happened.

The following is a report I was asked to write by the Organization of American States some time ago. It was meant to be part of a compendium of similar reports -from various authors- on the causes of Venezuela's humanitarian crisis: i.e. corruption. I publish it here, for future reference. Supporting notes and links can be seen in the pdf below.

Where Has Venezuela’s Money Gone?
By Alek Boyd

Check background here. In short, vessels Kitakaze (IMO 9221918) and Mirame (IMO 9227948) lifted about 3.8 million barrels of PDVSA crude in late December / early January. Tracor Trading Company Limited is shown in PDVSA's line up as final client. It is unclear what crude Kitakaze lifted, but Mirame loaded crude produced by PDVSA - Rosneft joint venture Petromonagas.

Joshua Goodman reports in "Venezuela hired Democratic Party donor for $6 million" about a FARA filing -by PDV USA Inc- that "...documents, which were disclosed Thursday, show a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil giant PDVSA agreed to hire Marcia Wiss’ Washington law firm in March 2017.

There's a great deal of excitement on news reported by Christian Brönnimann and Sylvain Besson in Swiss media, about 9 billion (CHF) worth of money laundering transactions originating in Venezuela / PDVSA done by some of Switzerland's finest banks.

UPDATED 19/01/2021 - 18:53 GMT - In late December two tankers journeyed to Venezuela with their AIS transponders turned off: Kitakaze (IMO 9221918) and Mirame (IMO 9227948). PDVSA's shipping line up shows these tankers loaded a total of 3.8 million barrels of crude, on behalf of a new client: Tracor Trading Company Limited. Data from TankerTrackers.com revealed the vessels' position at loading.

UPDATED 12 Oct.

The recent revelation that a Swiss watchdog had frozen $900 million in cash belonging to an Angolan "businessman" caused surprise in some quarters. Evidently, those surprised must have forgotten already the FIFA scandal. They must have missed also news about Michael Lauber. For those who haven't been following, that'd be Switzerland's Attorney General, basically in bed with the FIFA thugs he was meant to be investigating. We then have Swiss banks, historically the pride and joy and a considerable chunk of Switzerland's economy.

Local sources in Venezuela reported yesterday the assassination of Leonardo Santilli, a PDVSA contractor. Santilli was already in the crosshairs of U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for bribing PDVSA officials to obtain procurement contracts, which is PDVSA's standard operating procedure. The novelty here is that Santilli appears to have been hit by contract killers, allegedly due to his disposition to collaborate with DoJ.

PDVSA has found a way to beat sanctions from U.S. Department of the Treasury. According to shipping line up data seen by this site, it exported a total of 16.5 million barrels of crude in August. Spain's Repsol, Italy's ENI and India's Reliance regularly lifted crude. In addition, new completely unknown and dodgy operators associated to Alex Saab's network continued taking crude to Singapore, for StS transfer onto China-bound cargoes.