Blackouts in Caracas's oil summit caused by Trump's "turnaround artist"

There was an oil summit in Caracas this week. A small crowd gathered to see what can be snatched and grabbed in the fire sale of Venezuela's sovereign resources. Power went out, twice, during the event. The biggest oil baron in Venezuelan history, that is the man the State Dept. and the Pentagon chose to partner with because of his direct connection to Delcy & Trump and his superhuman talent to turn things around, was nowhere to be seen. Was he just having private discussion in the country club's green? The very same "turnaround artist" got billions of dollars worth of contracts at the beginning of the last decade, to fix Venezuela's power issues. Did the organisers not think relevant a panel discussion with the "expert in fixing outages" would be helpful to potential investors?

The story of Alejandro Betancourt, aka "turnaround artist", is starting to enter the public domain in America drip by drip. Every new article about Trump's partner in the largest oil deal in history is bringing new information that Venezuelans have known for years. Betancourt's connection to the Kremlin, for instance, has emerged. Not fully, but journalists, politicians and oil executives are getting curious.

Production numbers attributed to two-year-old NABEP venture are looking suspicious as well. For Betancourt did form a JV with Boris Ivanov & other Gazprom execs called Petrozamora, right after failing to fix power blackouts in Venezuela around 2011. That JV never pumped 200,000 barrels of crude per day (BPD). The road from 12,000 to 200,000 BPD, which is what Trump's propagandists are claiming as NABEP's daily output, includes production from PetroCedeño, in turn a JV developed by Total, Equinor and PDVSA.

Here's an expert, on the topic of PetroCedeño:

Para poner en perspectiva lo que representa que Total y Equinor se vayan de la Faja del Orinoco vale la pena recordar algunos datos de Petrocedeño. 1) Es el proyecto mas grande de la Faja y posiblemente el proyecto de inversion privada mas grande en la historia de Venezuela...

— Francisco J. Monaldi (@fmonaldi) July 29, 2021

Read the whole thread. Needless to say that the "turnaround artist" had absolutely nothing to do with development of PetroCedeño, regardless of however much the Trump administration would like people to believe otherwise. There's another JV that Delcy & Maduro granted, one developed by Italy's ENI.

What any intelligent analyst would do is to request NABEP a breakdown of claimed production figures:

1. How much is Petrozamora's?
2. How much is PetroCedeño's?
3. How much is Junin's?
4. How much is bought elsewhere and claimed as own?
5. By how much did each JV increase since NABEP took over?

That would give a clear idea of turnaround that the artist's direct involvement has had, would it not?

U.S. Congressmen have been sending letters to Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and other Trump officials demanding answers. None will be forthcoming. Legal experts will most probably report at some point that the Pentagon's involvement is illegal according to current U.S. laws. Same applies to Venezuela's side of things, where no law contemplates deals of such nature.

Will the man that failed to fix power outages (comparatively speaking a much simpler task) fix Venezuela's oil industry? He'll have to turnaround the first mess first.