juan carlos escotet

Imagine you are Victor Vargas, and you get up one morning to read a piece in Bloomberg Week that claims that your bank has $19.3 billion worth of assets, when in reality your bank's assets are $2.4 billion. Imagine you are Juan Carlos Escotet, and after you've

Official press release from BANESCO, refuting claims about an alleged $50 million bribe paid by Derwick Associates to President of Venezuelan Congress, Diosdado Cabello, through BANESCO Panama.

I know, I know, today's a Sunday, mothers' day in the UK, but the stuff in Twitter from @jescotet is just too good to ignore. Check out the following tweets:

Life seems to be getting more and more difficult for Derwick Associates. A Venezuelan news site reported two days ago that Thor Halvorssen (with whom I worked in The Human Rights Foundation back in 2008-2009) has filed a lawsuit in Miami against Derwick Associates, and its executives Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, Pedro Trebbau Lopez and Francisco D'Agostino.

The last couple of days have been kind of extraordinary, in the sense that some of chavismo's big dogs have come unhinged. First we saw Jose Vielma Mora, Governor of Tachira state where protests began, criticising President Maduro in a radio interview. Vielma Mora said he was against the brutal way in which protesters have been repressed, and added that he disagreed with keeping political prisoner Ivan Simonovis and opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez in jail (both on trumped charges). We then saw President of Congress, Diosdado Cabello, come on TV to lie about an alleged weapons cache that General Angel Vivas had in his house.