In Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) the accounts do not add up. The failure of the strategy designed since mid-2019 to evade the financial sanctions imposed by the United States caused a huge financial hole in the state oil company, the resignation of the until recently very powerful Minister of Oil, Tareck El Aissami, and the arrest of businessmen and former directors of PDVSA itself in the midst of a corruption scandal that cannot be hidden by the Chavista regime itself.
Although the authorities have avoided quantifying the losses from crude oil dispatched since 2019 through intermediaries, but still not collected, the company’s figures announce a shipwreck of billions of dollars. To the 8,406 million dollars that until August 2022 were in “accounts receivable”, as revealed by Armando.Info last November, the amount of another 230 invoices that PDVSA “ceded” to the State in an accounting operation was added, according to new documents obtained for this report.
A confidential report of October 11, 2022, prepared by the then Vice President of Commerce and Supply and today detained, Colonel Antonio Pérez Suárez, reveals that PDVSA transferred to the State uncollected invoices for oil shipments between 2019 and 2022 for 13,338 million dollars , in order to “close accounts receivable in the SAP computer system.” This amount includes a large part of the accounts receivable that PDVSA already registered up to August 2022 in the aforementioned report, but reveals other million-dollar liabilities for “shipments delivered to third parties on instructions from the National Executive” during the last four years.
The document reveals, for example, a non-payment to PDVSA of around 1.5 billion dollars associated with 19 of the companies controlled between 2019 and 2020 by Alex Saab Morán and Álvaro Pulido Vargas, the favorite contractors of Nicolás Maduro since he came to power.
The date of the confidential PDVSA report is also revealing, since both Nicolás Maduro and the Attorney General of the Republic appointed by the fraudulent National Constituent Assembly of 2017, Tarek William Saab, have recently acknowledged that it was in October of last year when they began investigations into corruption at PDVSA.
In addition to the ousted Colonel Antonio Pérez Suárez, whom William Saab described as the “main head of the corruption structure”, other executives of the PDVSA Vice Presidency of Commerce and Supply are detained, as well as some of the businessmen who were behind the companies. to which they had assigned shipments of Venezuelan crude, such as Alejandro Arroyo Pérez, Bernardo Arosio Hobaica or the Perdomo brothers of the HP Construction Company.
“Once the legally assigned crude was commercialized, the payments corresponding to Petróleos de Venezuela were not complied with (…) Apart from the fact that you are negotiating outside the law, they are not complying with the payments [sic]”, summarized William Saab on March 25, in what he defined as the mode of operation of one of the “most lurid” corruption schemes in recent years.
Although among those detained by the raid Álvaro Pulido, Alex Saab’s partner, is not here, it is known that his residence at the Country Club of Caracas was raided as part of the investigation, as confirmed by the Prosecutor to the WRadio from Colombia. In that same statement, the official disassociated Alex Saab from the case, whom Chavismo defends as a “Venezuelan diplomat” since his arrest in Cape Verde on June 12, 2020.
However, the documents obtained confirm that both Saab and Pulido are among the intermediaries that took the most oil from PDVSA and stopped paying the state company. In fact, a large part of the uncollected invoices from 2019 and 2020 that PDVSA transferred to the State are connected to the companies operated by Saab and Pulido, such as the Mexican Libre Abordo and Schlager Business Group, or the Russian Protón and Delta, among other.
Saab, even if it pays badly
Just as in 2016, in the midst of a wave of inflation and shortages of basic products, Maduro entrusted a good part of the food supply to the Colombian tandem for the so-called Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP), in mid-2019, at another time of trouble. , Maduro entrusted the commercialization of Venezuelan oil to the Colombian duo, with the mission of evading the obstacles that had been created by the sanctions that Washington imposed on the state oil company at the beginning of that same year.
Pdvsa’s internal documents confirm the failure of the strategy: at least 19 companies managed by the Saab-Pulido duo accumulated, still in October 2022, a debt with PDVSA of almost 1,500 million dollars. Two of these companies are the Mexican Libre Abordo and Schlager Business Group, with which PDVSA practically began this outsourcing in the sale of its products and behind which were Saab and Pulido together with the Mexican Joaquín Leal, sanctioned by the Treasury Department for mid 2020 to be considered the “conduit” to circumvent the sanctions against PDVSA.
At first, the business between PDVSA and the Mexican companies was conceived as a “humanitarian exchange” through which these companies loaded Venezuelan oil in exchange for the supply of goods. Thus, on June 13, 2019, Libre Abordo agreed with Corpovex, the state company in charge of centralizing public imports, for the sale of 1,000 tanker trucks and, four days later, on June 17, the delivery of 210,000 tons of white corn.
Both contracts totaled 195 million euros, but they were never fully executed. On the other hand, the oil charged and owed by Libre Abordo to PDVSA between 2019 and 2020 amounts to 422 million dollars distributed in 16 invoices that the state oil company finally transferred to the State. In the case of Schlager Business Group, the oil owed to PDVSA amounts to volumes quoted at 276 million dollars, distributed in 15 invoices of the year 2020.
The most paradoxical aspect of this commercial relationship, detrimental to PDVSA, was seen when the US authorities investigated the activities of Joaquín Leal and the Mexican companies: Libre Abordo announced its bankruptcy accusing losses of 90 million dollars. “The value of the merchandise that was going to be compensated for the oil was much lower than the value of the oil,” says a source who knew about Libre Abordo’s activities, but prefers to remain anonymous. An oil that, in addition, would remain in debt.
But the journey of Alex Saab and Álvaro Pulido as Venezuelan oil marketers did not end there. The Mexican companies were succeeded by others registered in Russia that, like the first, would ultimately be indebted to PDVSA for the oil they took.
The company Protón Sociedad Limitada owed PDVSA almost 90 million dollars, distributed in five invoices from the year 2020. Two of these invoices, 128300442 and 128300543, are dated May 31, 2020, just days before Alex Saab was arrested in Cape Verde as a result of the money laundering accusation that a Florida court had disclosed against him in mid-2019 and that, finally, also led to his extradition to the United States in October 2021.
Despite the debts it already had, on April 30, 2020, that same Protón Sociedad Limitada obtained two contracts from Bariven, a PDVSA subsidiary in charge of the corporation’s international purchases, for the supply of food for 1,023 million euros, payable with oil. It was the last big deal that Saab achieved just before being arrested. For this reason, its effective execution fell to Pulido, as revealed by Armando.Info in a report published last December, but from the Moscow office of the Colombian businessmen in charge of the also Colombian María Camila Ballén Hernández, who registered Protón in Russia.
Delta, Novosi Solutions, Shamrium, Xiamen Logistics or Zervekas are other of the 19 companies that controlled Saab and Pulido through their operators in Caracas and Moscow to market PDVSA oil and whose invoices for almost 1,500 million dollars entered into the transfer accounting that the state oil company made to the State, according to the documents obtained for this report. In fact, these five companies were listed, together with the Mexican Schlager Business Group, in an email that arrived on August 11, 2020 to the PDVSA “Contract Administration” department to request an “account statement” of all the companies that were part of what they called a “consortium”, as also published by Armando.Info.
“Alex Saab was in charge of the political part of obtaining oil quotas, compensation, contracts, while Álvaro Pulido was in charge of the operational and financial part,” says another source who also prefers anonymity.
Accounts receivable even in Russia
Unlike the treatment of the debts of the companies operated by Saab and Pulido, the confidential report of October 11, 2022 did include the defaults of other companies linked to other businessmen that were already listed in the accounts receivable report. to August of last year, and whose cases had already reached judicial instances in Venezuela for non-compliance with payments.
One of those companies is Montmagastre Ventures Ltd, registered in Belize, a tax haven in Central America, with a subsidiary in Serbia, and linked in Venezuela to the brothers Majed and Khaled Khalil Majzoub, old Chavismo contractors in different businesses. The debt of Montmagastre Ventures Ltd with PDVSA and ultimately transferred to the State reaches almost 311 million dollars, distributed in eight invoices for the year 2021.
That case of Montmagastre Ventures Ltd reached the Supreme Court of Justice itself because the company, which would use the oil to collect a debt that another company linked to the Khalils had with PDVSA, ended up denouncing the theft of the shipment.
The report detailing the assignment of PDVSA invoices to the State also included the debts of Supraquimic, the manufacturer of Clic cleaning products, owned by businessman José Alfredo Llamozas González, for 221 million dollars; and that of almost 50 million dollars from Arcos Services Ecuador, linked to Kristina Antonorsi Quintero, arrested on October 9, 2022.
Other debts that did not appear in Pdvsa’s accounts receivable until August of last year and that appear in the new report of October 2022 are those of some companies that sold Venezuelan oil to Russia, especially between 2021 and 2022.
Three companies identified as One Maritime Services, Tracor Trading and Yunshu Maritime, were left owing PDVSA around 1.2 billion dollars for oil transported in 2021. At the close of this investigation, it was not possible to establish which businessmen operate these companies.
The administrative disorder in PDVSA’s accounts receivable is such that, according to the documents, last October and with the endorsement of the Vice President of the Republic, Delcy Rodríguez, the state oil company was authorized so that in the next oil contracts “they allow the incorporation of the figure of assignment of invoice and compensation with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for shipments of hydrocarbons that in the future must be delivered to third parties by instructions of the National Executive”.
Meanwhile, at Pdvsa they still do not know where the money for a large part of the oil sold since 2019 is.