pdvsa

On 18 February 2020, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Rosneft Trading S.A. for "operating in the oil sector of the Venezuelan economy." OFAC's announcement included, under "Recent Rosneft Trading S.A. Activity" the following:

- "In January 2020, Rosneft Trading S.A. facilitated, on behalf of PdVSA, a shipment of two million barrels of Merey-16 crude oil from Venezuela to West Africa."

Readers of this site will know that Wilmer Ruperti is a topic of interest. To cut it short, Ruperti went from being a “tanker master”, to become the go-to-guy for all of PDVSA’s shipping needs. Quite a feat, assisted (as per Ruperti’s own claims) by Ali Rodriguez and Rafael Ramirez. In the process, of course, he made a fortune.

Recently, oil related news about Venezuela have focused on the arrest of two Chevron employees. There were scant details about the arrested. Their names and nationalities have been misreported. Carlos Jose Algarra Villegas and Rene Adrian Vasquez Mora are accused of treason, by the chavista regime, for refusing to sign a no-bid contract -with usually highly inflated prices- for PDVSA - Chevron joint venture Petropiar. These two men stand no chance of redress for one simple reason: they're both Venezuelan nationals.

A batch of official documents related to Odebrecht contracts in Venezuela has been leaked to this site. It is quite the task to recall similar corruption schemes, anywhere on earth. In short, Brazilian Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, as well as the highest echelons of the ruling Workers Party, acted as pawns in a gargantuan corruption scheme set up by Odebrecht.

Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) is, without a doubt, the largest corruption scheme of the XXI century.

Information about Banca Privada D'Andorra (BPA), a "primary money laundering concern" according to U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), continues to be published. The latest shows how BPA Serveis (chaired by Higini Cierco) was instructed by Eudomario Carruyo, Petroleos de Venezuela's VP Finance, to create a Panamanian shell corporation to get bribes.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report, in August 2014, on prosecutors from the Southern District of New York probing Venezuela's rampant corruption.

For the past three/four weeks I’ve noticed a spike in Google searches for corruption-related Venezuelan names and PDVSA. Some of the world’s biggest and best known banks and accounting firms seem all too keen, suddenly, of finding out what’s going in Venezuela. It could well be related to PDVSA’s announcement of a $7 billion bond swap. But it could also be due to some persistent rumours about impending legal cases against PDVSA that could all but obliterate the company’s ability to meet its current international financial obligations, let alone future ones.

Further to Bloomberg's reporting that Swiss authorities are collaborating with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's corruption probe into PDVSA and Derwick Associates, I posted an open letter, enclosed below.

Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA as it is commonly referred to, is an oil conglomerate fully owned by the Venezuelan State. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, it was created in 1976, by then President Carlos Andres Pérez, as part of a nationalization policy drive that gave Venezuela full control of exploration, production and commercialization of its natural resources.