{"id":65153,"date":"2021-06-14T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-14T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/armando.info\/?p=65153"},"modified":"2021-09-07T21:23:33","modified_gmt":"2021-09-07T21:23:33","slug":"two-stepbrothers-one-penalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/two-stepbrothers-one-penalty\/","title":{"rendered":"Two stepbrothers \u2014 One penalty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In early 2020, Publimetro<\/em>, a free newspaper<\/a> in Mexico City, published an unsigned article that reported, \u201cDozens of former directors and high-level executives of PDVSA [...] currently collaborate with companies that are taking crude oil out of Venezuela.\u201d According to this media, such companies were then focusing \u201cthe lifting of oil, after OFAC sanctioned Russian company Rosneft and one of its subsidiaries\u201d in the South American country. The article mentioned the Venezuelan citizens, Dolly Mendoza and Mirtha Quintero, among the \u201cformer key players of the oil company [PDVSA<\/em>] in supply, operations and trade matters,\u201d who had been recruited at that time by private companies \u201cwith little or no experience in hydrocarbons.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though the newspaper did not attribute the information to any source, it certainly drew an identikit of the underground operation of crude oil sales that by that time had been operating for almost a year from Mexico. The scheme was designed and set in motion by the young local businessman, Joaqu\u00edn Leal<\/a>, following an initial request from Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodr\u00edguez<\/a> G\u00f3mez. The express purpose was to take advantage of alternative international trade circuits to bypass the financial sanctions imposed by Washington on the regime of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, and to continue placing the oil that PDVSA was still barely producing and other coveted Venezuelan raw materials, like aluminum and coal, on the global market.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the knowledge and apparent connivance of the government of President<\/a> Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador, the scheme got going. Although the regime in Caracas was thirsty for foreign currency, other than the U.S. dollar, \u2014an urge not yet satisfied\u2014 the first transaction that Leal and his company Libre Abordo made with the Venezuelan state-owned Corpovex in June 2020 adopted the fa\u00e7ade of a \u201chumanitarian exchange\u201d<\/a> of white corn and tanker trucks for two million barrels of PDVSA\u2019s oil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deal eventually gained scale and was focused on the sale for cash only. As evident in the thousands of internal documents of the network, \u2014that Armando.info<\/strong> and the newspaper EL PA\u00cdS of Madrid obtained and reviewed together to produce the series of reports entitled \u201cMexican Bypass against Sanctions,\u201d of which this article is the fifth installment\u2014 it metastasized and extended its tentacles to some thirty countries. Among the dozens of alter egos<\/em> and companies that Leal developed, were the links with Alex Saab, the Colombian trader who became Nicol\u00e1s Maduro\u2019s favorite supplier, and company Elemento Oil & Gas Ltd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the Element<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Elemento (in English, element) <\/em>is a company registered since March 2015 in the island nation of Malta, a renowned tax haven in the eastern Mediterranean. It is not a legal entity that Joaqu\u00edn Leal had incorporated. Its creator was Italian broker Alessandro Bazzoni, who founded it under the initial name of CT Energia Oil & Gas Ltd. Before changing its name to Elemento, Bazzoni made a new issue of company shares in November 2015 to bring in, as a 50 percent owner, Venezuelan businessman Francisco D\u2019Agostino.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Although he had nothing to do with the oil marketing scheme, Francisco D\u2019Agostino managed a finance company in Panama called Element.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That same year of 2015, both Bazzoni and D\u2019Agostino bought<\/a> for at least US$ 32 million a small Texas oil company, Harvest Natural Resources, which at that time had a tense alliance with PDVSA. Harvest owned 20 percent of the joint venture resulting from the alliance with the state oil company which, under the name of Petrodelta S.A., intended to put into production fields in the Orinoco Oil Belt in the states of Monagas and Delta Amacuro, in eastern Venezuela. The operation raised the public profile of CT Energia\/ Elemento Oil & Gas Ltd in the country. In a 2018 article<\/a> of Armando. info<\/strong>, apropos of the fact that the leak of the so-called Paradise Papers, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of Washington DC, included the articles of incorporation of the broad holding of companies with the prefix CT, \u2014initials of Cinque Terre, the region on Italy\u2019s northwestern coast where he was born\u2014 Alessandro Bazzoni just admitted that he was \u201can advisor\u201d to Elemento and that it could market no more than \u201cfour PDVSA vessels between February and April 2017.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, Elemento\u2019s activity with Venezuelan oil would be much more intense in the future, though not because of the exploitation in Monagas, but due to its role as a broker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In April 2020, Elemento resold to clients in Singapore<\/a> one of the first two shipments of crude oil that Libre Abordo and Joaqu\u00edn Leal\u2019s network in Mexico produced. In some dozens of the thousands of internal documents of the network that Armando.info<\/strong> and EL PA\u00cdS reviewed, corresponding to the period from November 2019 to May 2020, two executives of Elemento, both Venezuelan and with email addresses ending with the suffix elemento.com.mt<\/em>, decisively intervene in the intense exchange of communications. One, is Joaqu\u00edn Garc\u00eda, a former employee of PDVSA in the marketing area; the other, is Dolly Mendoza, the \u201cformer key figure\u201d of PDVSA, mentioned in the report of the Mexican newspaper, Publimetro<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mendoza has been identified as CEO of Elemento in newspaper reports<\/a> that erroneously call her \u201cDoly.\u201d A 41-year-old mechanical engineer, Mendoza held until 2016 a managerial position at PDVSA, in the area of White Products, Purchases and Supplies. In the reviewed documentation on the secret network in Mexico, Mendoza often appears giving instructions regarding the purchase and invoicing of crude oil shipments, the coordination of the logistics of vessels in STS (ship to ship) operations, as well as the relationship with service suppliers of quality certification of the goods that PDVSA delivered, among other technical aspects. Mendoza\u2019s instructions were often addressed to Joaqu\u00edn Garc\u00eda.

\u201cI propose t[hat<\/em>] Libre [Abordo<\/em>] and Cosmos [sic<\/em>] act as consignee and endorse that BL [bill of lading<\/em>] in the name of Swissoil [Trading<\/em>],\u201d Mendoza wrote, for example, in an e-mail dated February 17, 2020, addressed, among others, to Garc\u00eda and Alessandro Bazzoni, founder of Elemento. In that sentence alone, Mendoza, an executive of Elemento, not only referred to Libre Abordo, but to other actors in the cast of companies formed by Leal to move Venezuelan crude exports. One was Cosmo Resources, a company created by the Mexican in Singapore; and the other, Swissoil Trading S.A., an office in Switzerland in which the Swiss, Philip Apikian, was listed as the sole administrator and Alessandro Bazzoni as the director.<\/p>\n\n\n