plagiarism

Thug Alejandro Betancourt was recently in the news. A data scrapping effort by France's Le Monde (#OpenLux) revealed Betancourt uses Luxembourg in his money laundering activities. Readers of this site had known that, of course, for many years. The Miami Herald had -at last- the decency to link to this site's story about Betancourt's little energy deal with the Russians: Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V. and Petrozamora. Again, nothing new there, that stuff was exposed here years ago.

Features of modern life always get late to Venezuela. Investigative journalism was one of them. When we started learning the ropes and posting breaking stories about Venezuelan rampant corruption, in the early 2000s, nobody was publishing investigative journalism work in English online. Our first series, about propaganda outfit Venezuela Information Office, exposed Andres Izarra, Eva Golinger, Greg Wilpert, Mark Weisbrot, Code Pink, TransAfrica Forum, Michael Schellenberger and a whole bunch of psycophantic paid agents.

In the latest exhibit of "news" related to Venezuela, Bloomberg took a page out of Reuters' plagiarism book and published a report about Libre Abordo, Schlager Group, Grupo JOMADI and PDVSA.

#plagiarism, @reuters style: https://t.co/iuXybw3GdP pic.twitter.com/cWyH5V8SvN

Argus Media bills itself as the "Leading independent provider of energy and commodity price benchmarks". As other industry analysis firms of the type, it sells its services in the open market. Being "in the know", and boasting a network of experts and in-country analysts probably makes part of its sales pitch.