The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

The opaque Venezuelan oil consortium that knocked on Pemex's door

2021-01-17T15:10:56.125Z


A network that moves millions of barrels of crude from the Caribbean country and that has been in the sights of the United States for months has falsified documents from banks and refineries in Europe to try to make transactions with the Mexican parastatal, which rejected them


Last May, a practically unknown company made a multimillion dollar offer to Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex).

The proposal of Promotores del Fomento, which until a couple of years ago was dedicated to private security, was to buy five million barrels of oil, two million barrels of gasoline and another two million barrels of fuel oil each month from the Mexican parastatal. .

The company had no website or experience in the sector, but managed to slip a letter of intent in the office of Octavio Romero, the CEO of Pemex.

This was just one of several attempts to do business with the oil company by Joaquín Leal, a 28-year-old Mexican businessman.

Just a month later, Leal was included in the black list of the US Treasury Department after circumventing the US embargo against Venezuela and managing to monopolize up to 40% of PDVSA's monthly exports, through an opaque network of intermediaries and companies. facade that crosses the five continents.

It is the same network that came to light last year for bringing tanker trucks and shipments of corn to Venezuela in exchange for crude.

Behind the requests, to which EL PAÍS and

Armando.Info

had access

, there is a trail of falsified documents and clues that Venezuelan crude has been traded irregularly in the most remote corners of the planet.

"We appreciate the opportunity to present our proposal for collaboration with the most important company in our country and we recognize the effort that you and all Pemex workers make every day to strengthen the company of all Mexicans."

This is how the letter that one of Leal's emissaries sent to the general management of the oil company, dated May 12, began.

Promotores del Fomento sold their proposal as a "win-win" and claimed that their intention was to lend a hand after the collapse of international oil prices.

The idea, in reality, was to replicate a business model that emerged in Venezuela: to buy hydrocarbons at auction prices from distressed parastatals, such as PDVSA, and resell it below market prices to buyers operating in the shadow of the international regulations.

To circumvent US sanctions, Leal and two Mexican companies, Libre Abordo and Schlager Business Group, disguised the transactions as humanitarian aid.

There was no money involved, at least in the contracts.

It was a scheme of exchanges.

The Mexican side of the plot shipped products in kind and PDVSA paid them with oil and logistics to get them out of the country in ships.

Mexico's Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) launched an investigation to track some 200 million euros of those transactions.

In a matter of months, Leal went from being an entrepreneur promoting himself in the Mexican press as an "energy guru" to one of the targets of the United States government.

When the sanctions were made public on June 18, the White House described him as the main orchestrator of the network.

At the head of the network, according to Washington, was also the Colombian Alex Saab, detained in Cape Verde with an extradition request to the United States and identified as one of Nicolás Maduro's key figureheads.

The risk of the business was high and the expectations, too.

Leal stated in his request to Pemex that Promotores del Fomento expected to sell 9.975 million dollars in barrels of oil and fuel oil this year.

From the second half of the year, Washington froze all the financial assets of Leal and his Mexican accomplices.

The sanctions did not stop the business.

An investigation by EL PAÍS and

Armando.Info

points out that the oil exchanges that have been in the sights of the FBI and Mexico's Financial Intelligence Unit, valued at more than 200 million euros, are just the tip of the

iceberg

and are part of a plot that has been replicated with multiple companies.

A series of documents submitted by the Mexican businessman and his partners to register as a Pemex buyer not only unravels the frustrated plan to do business with the Mexican parastatal, but also details his link with an extensive network of contacts that passes through Mexico, Venezuela , front companies in the Caribbean, Scandinavian banks, trading companies in the Mediterranean and partners in Asia.

The network also has shipping intermediaries with flags of countries and territories such as Liberia, Panama and the Marshall Islands.

It is a long trip around the world that sees a trail of millions of euros and millions of barrels of crude.

EL PAÍS and Armando.Info have tried to collect the Mexican businessman's comments for this report, but have not been successful.

Pemex has also not responded to multiple requests for comment.

The purchase of gasoline - like the one attempted with Pemex - was in the plans of Alex Saab and Joaquín Leal since the beginning of the oil business with PDVSA in mid-2019. These intentions became more explicit when the fuel shortage at the stations worsened Venezuelan service providers.

Thus, with another corporate identity, that of the Jomadi Logistics & Cargo Group, a Mexican company related to Libre Abordo and Schlager Business Group, they proposed a

swap

or exchange contract with the Venezuelan state company.

The deal involved the swap of millions of barrels of Venezuelan Merey 16 crude for 95 octane Mexican gasoline.

The supply contract would run from March 25 to July 25, 2020. Venezuelan oil was to be transported to ports in Turkey.

Sources familiar with the operation assure that in the end the contract was not executed and that, therefore, Saab designed the scheme to bring gasoline from Iran to Venezuela, something that his lawyer, former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, recently recognized.

"Saab traveled to Iran and negotiated the delivery of eleven million gallons of gasoline, which arrived in May," Garzón told the

Colombian

newspaper

El Espectador

.

Since November 2019, Libre Abordo and Leal made a first contact with Pemex, although this time they offered two shipments of one million barrels of Venezuelan crude.

Despite the fact that the United States announced in May that it was following the trail of several companies that had managed to reverse the embargo on Venezuela, Leal submitted that same month the first purchase request to Pemex.

Promotores del Fomento was founded in April 2010 in Irapuato, the city where Leal was born, according to the commercial registry of Mexico.

Its original name was Servicios Integrales de Seguridad Privada, established as a surveillance company.

In November 2019, the commercial minutes account for the transformation: it changed the name, the owners, the legal representatives and the legal object of the firm to turn it into an energy wholesaler.

The company grew fast.

He moved to Arcos Bosques, a shopping center with upscale offices in western Mexico City, and reported sales profits of $ 2.2 million, according to consultancy Dun & Bradstreet.

A group of young Mexicans and Venezuelans also worked in the office.

They are all around thirty years old.

Joaquín Leal appears as the owner of 50% of the shares.

Alessandro Bazzoni, an Italian with a long history of doing business with PDVSA, owned the other half of the company.

Bazzoni is also a shareholder of Element LTD, a company in Malta with energy interests in Venezuela since 2017, according to the commercial registry of that country.

Bazzoni simply presents himself as an advisor to Element and has made contradictory statements about his relationship with PDVSA, going so far as to deny any commercial link.

The plot reached the British courts last January.

In a lawsuit by Tansy, a shipping company from the Marshall Islands, against Element, a different story is told and it is described as a cartel of resellers with extensive influence in Chavismo.

"Bazzoni said that he could no longer lift PDVSA shipments because Element had already bought too many," reads the judicial summary, which ruled on a Venezuelan oil shipment valued at 100 million dollars.

"Bazzoni said that he could arrange the purchase of several shipments [from PDVSA] and that he was looking for partners who could buy them," added one of the statements.

One of the lines of investigation is that the Bazzoni clan is the piece that unites Leal and Saab, a connection that has not been specified in the US communications on the sanctions.

In the procedures with Pemex, Promotores gives an account of the link between Leal and its Italian partner.

Philipp Apikian, owner of Swissoil Trading SA, an energy company founded in Switzerland in 1998, also appears as director of the Mexican company.

Swissoil is also mentioned in the London case for having ties to the Element.

American Richard Rothenberg, who appears as Element Director in Malta, is Promotores' CFO.

Also mentioned are the Chilean Joaquín García as head of operations and the Russian Slava Aleksandridi as commercial director.

All have held their positions, according to Leal, for at least three years, that is, since before his company formally existed.

Swissoil even extends a commercial reference for its sister company to achieve the deal with the Mexican oil company.

"Business between the two companies is concentrated in high-density oil transactions, as well as maritime shipments to Asia and the Middle East," reads the document, which ensures that both firms trade more than 100 million dollars each trimester.

The letter is signed by Apikian, director of Swissoil and, at the same time, Promotores del Fomento.

It is not the only point that draws the attention of the documentation.

To support the request, Leal submitted a series of letters of recommendation and contracts concluded with unusual partners.

One is an agreement with Eastern Refining Limited, the only refinery

owned by

Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation

,

the state oil company in that Asian country.

I know

signed on May 31, 2019, six months before the formal constitution of Promotores del Fomento.

The two-year agreement allowed Leal to deliver up to two million barrels of crude each month, which were then refined by his client.

Eastern Refining returned it to the Mexican businessman, who then took charge of marketing it.

Another document presented by Leal is a contract signed in July 2019 with Hellenic Petroleum, the largest refiner in Greece, to process up to one million barrels of crude per month.

In both agreements it is said that the oil would come from "known suppliers", but in the latter case there is a quality section that speaks of the fact that the standards of various Venezuelan blends such as Boscán, Merey 16, Zuata, Mesa 30 and Saint Barbara.

Leal's company, according to the document, was supposed to deliver the shipments at the port of Hamriya, in the United Arab Emirates.

"Business between the two companies is around 32 million dollars a year," reads a letter of recommendation, allegedly issued by another partner in Greece, Aegean Oil.

Promotores del Fomento's bank credentials are three letters of recommendation allegedly issued by two Norwegian banks, Instabank and Sparebanken More, and one Swedish, Handelsbanken.

"It is our opinion that its management has had extensive experience in oil commercial activities and is reliable, and that Promotores del Fomento has a sufficient financial situation to carry out these commercial activities," the letter attributed to Instabank reads.

It turned out to be, in virtually all cases, an apparent scam.

"We are not familiar with the letters presented," they reply from Handelsbanken.

"Our company has not issued or granted any of the attached letters of recommendation and therefore it is a forgery", respond from Aegean Oil, which claims never to have had Promotores del Fomento or Leal on its list of clients.

Hellenic Petroleum also claims that the "contract" is false, but goes one step further: "We intend to examine the case in depth and the possibility of taking legal action against anyone who has used our company name in bad faith" .

Norwegian banks did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did the refinery in Bangladesh.

Pemex rejected a first request from Promoters on May 27.

The answer was that the documentation was incomplete and that the company did not have its own infrastructure to guarantee the deal.

The oil company ruled that Promotores sought to benefit as an intermediary in the market, which was in conflict with the policies of PMI Trading, Pemex's arm for international trade.

In early June, Promotores del Fomento was liquidated, it appears in the commercial registry of Mexico.

In July, weeks after Leal was blacklisted by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a purchase request similar to Promotores del Fomento appeared.

This time on behalf of Supplied Bennu, a Mexican company specialized in the electricity market that Leal advised for three years.

Leal's name does not appear in Bennu's business minutes, but he is one of the companies mentioned in The Mystic Universe Capital, a Canadian investment fund created by Leal in 2019. The Mystic Universe Capital has only invested in companies related to him, according to its website, today deleted.

Bennu presented to Pemex practically the same credentials to support his request, such as letters of recommendation from Instabank and Handelsbanken, and a commercial reference from Aegean Oil, also discarded as apocryphal documents.

The proposal was to buy 20.8 million barrels of fuel oil in 12 months.

The first shipments would begin with shipments of 700,000 barrels and would close with massive deliveries of 2.8 million barrels with the intention of reaching Asia.

Some of Leal's ties on that continent are real.

In Southeast Asia, a major global refining center, the businessman had Cosmo Resources LTD, a company registered in Singapore last February and sanctioned by OFAC.

The intention was for Cosmo to channel deals with various clients in the

commodities

market

in that region.

Enrique Woodhouse, the owner of Bennu, acknowledges that he had a business relationship with Leal, but assures that his company has nothing to do with the oil market and that he did not receive resources from Mystic.

"If there is a request of this type, it must be presumed false, made with improper use of documents or altered documents and with breach of trust by the person who made it," responds Woodhouse.

"There were deals to sell a part or all of Bennu, but there was no agreement and once he was sanctioned, all relationship with him was cut off," he adds.

Roberto Deniz

is a reporter for the Venezuelan investigation portal Armando.info.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-01-17

You may like

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-27T16:45:54.081Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.