Scions of different lineages of tycoons in Venezuela, Francisco D’Agostino and Eduardo Cisneros are non-blood relatives. They were also partners for a short time in Elemento Oil & Gas Ltd, a Malta-based company, over which the young Cisneros eventually took full ownership. Elemento was a protagonist in the secret network of Venezuelan crude oil marketing that Joaquín Leal activated from Mexico. However, when it came to imposing sanctions, Washington penalized D’Agostino only… Why?
When Vice President Delcy Rodríguez turned to a group of Mexican friends and partners to lessen the new electricity emergency in Venezuela, she laid the foundation stone of a shortcut through which Chavismo and its commercial allies have dodged the sanctions imposed by Washington on PDVSA’s exports of crude oil. Since then, with Alex Saab, Joaquín Leal and Alessandro Bazzoni as key figures, the circuit has spread to some thirty countries to trade other Venezuelan commodities. This is part of the revelations of this joint investigative series between the newspaper El País and Armando.info, developed from a leak of thousands of documents.
The paradisiacal tourist island of the Venezuelan Caribbean became, shortly after the death of President Hugo Chávez, in the place of a plot linked to tax havens. A leader of the far-left coalition Syriza and today powerful minister of the Greek Government, together with a Cypriot lawyer specializing in offshore business, who appeared in the Panama Papers traveled to the island. Nobody known with whom did they meet, but it is known that they completed their mysterious odyssey aboard a private jet of Majed Khalil, an entrepreneur linked to the Caracas regime.
