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.

David Boies is a household name in American legal circles. He's defended the rich, the famous, the disgraced, the thugs, and everything in between. Boies' adventures in Venezuela, were it not for a long series of exposés in this website, are mostly unknown.

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.