pdvsa

Dear ICE,

Saw your news release yesterday about Raul Gorrin, entitled "Venezuelan attorney and businessman added to ICE Most Wanted List for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering."

The sheer amount of #fakenews circulating is staggering. A clueless, ignorant adolescent, being "person of the year" provides just the explanation needed to grasp the sort of intellectual rigour in editorial rooms across the world. Reuters, a news agency that has plagiarised without attribution stuff published here, came yesterday with a totally unsubstantiated piece (based on "two people with knowledge of PDVSA data"), suggesting PDVSA's crude output had jumped 20%. Any person with a subscription to maritime data services can see how crude offtake has increased recently.

SEE UPDATES BELOW | Got a Google alert this morning, about Charles Henry de Beaumont, the mega corrupt French-Swiss banker from Compagnie Bancaire Helvetique involved in multi billion dollar money laundering schemes with Luis and Ignacio Oberto Anselmi, Francisco Convit, Alejandro Betancourt, Danilo Diazgranados, Rafael Ramirez, Victor Aular Blanco, Juan Andres Wallis Brandt, etc. Curiously, when I clicked on the link, to a Miami Herald article, it led to a missing page. It does not matter.

Reuters reported yesterday: "Brazilian investigators said on Friday a Greek-flagged ship carrying Venezuelan crude was the source of oil tarring Brazil’s coastline over the past two months..." It goes on to claim "A federal police document seen by Reuters said the tanker, Bouboulina, owned by Greece’s Delta Tankers Ltd, appears to have spilled the crude about 700 km (420 miles) off Brazil’s coast around July 28-29,

Reuters posted an "exclusive" yesterday about corruption in Brazil that's been in the public domain for a while. Just like Global Witness before, Reuters just translates criminal probes published in Portuguese by Brazilian prosecutors, and then adds the sensationalist breaking news bit.

Little advertised, and less reported about, we were informed that Norway's Equinor got an OFAC license on June 7, 2019, for "clean-up or remediation, ordinarily incident and necessary to facilitate the clean-up and remediation of the Petrocedeno Production Oil spill site, including affected surface areas, adjacent lands, and areas of the Morichal San Antonio Creek, as described in the Application." [bod added]

Just going to leave this in here, for future reference:

UPDATED 14/07/2019* - 16/07/2019* | In the ever evolving game of chicken between PDVSA and U.S. sanctions regime, a new player emerges: Singapore's PROCERIUM ENERGY PTE. LTD.  (201732917R).

Via a very kind collaborator and Istanbul resident, this site has learned of yet another twist on the topic of gasoline and naphta Turkish imports destined to keep PDVSA running: Grupo IVEEX, the shell controlled by Miguel Silva Perez used in the two-month contract with MCC Petroleum, was sold for 10,000 Turkish lira to tourists-guide Erhan Kap about one month ago.

Further to MCC Petroleum's deals of late with PDVSA, and Claus Ritzenhofen's denial of any business relationship with PDVSA, check out Miguel Josue Silva Perez, proud president of CAVENEX (Venezuela's Chamber of Exporters).