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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.
PDVSA, Venezuela's State-owned energy conglomerate, was taken over over by Hugo Chavez in 2002. Chavez realised early on that in order to succeed, his cosmic revolution would have to have unrestricted access to unlimited funding. That is where Rafael Ramirez, the perfect yes-man, slotted right in. Upon being appointed by Chavez as both PDVSA CEO and Minister of Energy, he was in charge of supervising himself, i.e. Ramirez the Minister had to keep all activities of Ramirez the PDVSA CEO in check.
UPDATED 25/08/2020 - Sources have informed this site that Reliance may be lifting up to eight cargoes in August (four have already been lifted). When this site put the question to a senior official with the Trump administration, whether Reliance had obtained a waiver / OFAC license, reply was in the negative. Whatever the case, Nicolas Maduro has cracked it.
MT Europride, if a search would be run right now, is an oil products tanker, IMO 9157777, owned by Eurotankers Inc, a shipping company that was recently reported in the news for involvement in a gasoline cargo with Wilmer Ruperti. PDVSA sources have informed this site about a rather odd operation currently taking place with Europride in Venezuela. Fearing further sanctions, Europride is to become Almada. It is waiting at the ready to be released. Trouble is, paperwork coming from a fresh registered @gmail address is all dodgy. TIPCO, through Asdrubal Chavez as per our sources, is involved.
SEE UPDATE BELOW - The latest back in chavista land is that Reliance, Mukesh Ambani's energy company, is due to lift four cargoes in August, in addition to 1MB lifted in early July. Sources have informed this site that Reliance has gotten an OFAC license from U.S. Treasury to trade with PDVSA. A call made to Treasury to corroborate was replied with an explanation that only licensee/s, or their legal counsel, can obtain information about own license/s: no information can be given to third parties.
Further to our post yesterday about Tareck el Aissami's orders to further obfuscate trading information from PDVSA's SAP accounting system, this site has obtained the latest SAP summary for the month of June. There is correct correlation between PDVSA's crude lifting line up and SAP, insofar as REPSOL and ENI cargoes are concerned.
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.
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.
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