In September 2013, while conducting research and seeking contacts for a publication on Luis Oberto, I received an email from a source stating that Oberto and Francisco Convit had purchased an oil well for $45 million in Zulia. Francisco Convit is one of the executives at Derwick Associates (yes, Derwick Associates aimed to be a “leading” company in contracting, acquiring, and installing power plants). Through further investigations, I discovered that Convit was, in fact, a director at something called Derwick Oil & Gas, incorporated in Barbados in 2011.
So, Derwick Associates shares executives/directors with Derwick Oil & Gas, and a source reported that Luis Oberto and Francisco Convit had partnered on an oil well. I searched and inquired, but I couldn’t find any corroboration to prove that information was leaked, beyond the details of the Barbados registration. There was always the possibility that Derwick could venture into oil. The contracting of power plants for Venezuela occurred after signing a Letter of Intent on September 30, 2009, with BARIVEN, a subsidiary of PDVSA, outlining the equipment and installed capacity up to the last megawatt.
It was natural (a toe in the door) for Derwick to “expand” or “diversify” into oil after exhausting all possible overpriced offers related to power plants and intriguing billions in the process. Given the type of relationship developed with BARIVEN/PDVSA, and the manner of their hiring, i.e., BARIVEN/PDVSA agreed to submit for consideration any details regarding the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds, Derwick’s involvement in oil was to be expected. Additionally, they could credibly claim “expertise” in oil-related matters, since Edgard Romero Lazo (Operations Manager at Derwick) was a contractor for PDVSA in Zulia and even had a stint with Odebrecht, hence the proper corrupt pedigree.
In the absence of evidence or a leaked contract, what I had was inconclusive. But then, a source in Madrid mentioned that the Derwick guys boasted, at social gatherings, about an exciting “new venture,” hinting that it was energy-related but separate from their power plant business. An unrelated source confided that Maersk Drilling Venezuela would be sold to a group of “Venezuelan investors.” Maersk Drilling Venezuela operates several barges for PDVSA in Lake Maracaibo under management contracts. Having found a clear statement from Maersk about their willingness to divest from operations in Venezuela, I inquired and they confirmed they were indeed looking to sell (perhaps due to a multibillion-dollar debt with PDVSA).
Could Derwick be that group of “Venezuelan investors”? However, this information surfaced after that email I received in September of last year, and Maersk hasn’t finalized any deal regarding their Venezuelan barges yet.
But in the last two weeks, two leaks put an end to the uncertainty. The first involved the offer from Derwick Oil & Gas, currently seeking to sell oil and gas to Morgan Stanley. I consulted some sources and found that the former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Hans Hertell, had been tracking Derwick’s orders in certain sectors for a while. Hertell, who has his own little dirty secrets from his strangely long tenure as ambassador in RD, claimed that Derwick Oil & Gas was in a position to sell 75,000 barrels per day. At today’s prices, that’s worth about $2.7 billion a year.
Hertell’s assertion sent me searching for an official announcement from PDVSA regarding granting Derwick Oil & Gas the right to openly market Venezuelan oil, not PDVSA’s, but their own. Such matters must be public, according to the Constitution and the current Hydrocarbons Law in Venezuela. Furthermore, companies wishing to sell Venezuelan oil and related products in international markets must register with PDVSA or establish some sort of partnership with the Venezuelan oil giant. Unfortunately, there’s nothing, not a single statement, mention, or official declaration regarding this in PDVSA’s latest report. Most likely, as with all of Derwick’s contracts with Venezuelan institutions in the past, there must be some clause in a private agreement between PDVSA and Derwick Oil & Gas that prohibits either party from disclosing any details about their arrangement. Damn the laws.
The second leak was more revealing. It turns out that the Derwick folks also visited BTG Pactual, Brazil’s largest investment bank. Pactual, let’s not forget, acquired 50% of Petrobras’s African unit for $1.53 billion. So they could have a similar interest in Venezuela. Well, at this time, the Derwick people weren’t selling oil and gas but rather oil concessions in Venezuela. Derwick’s offer to potential investors is to form 50-50 “joint ventures,” claiming that in addition to capital investment, their added value is that, as a kind of agents of PDVSA, they can get approvals for things in Venezuela without issues. How on earth can Derwick offer oil concessions in Venezuela to an investment bank? Is PDVSA outsourcing its international investment strategy to increase production to companies like Derwick now? And what kind of deal does Derwick have with PDVSA that allows partnership offers to players outside the country?
So now there’s a leak from September 2013, claiming that one of the directors of Derwick Oil & Gas bought an oil well, supported by gossip from Madrid in the first quarter of 2014, confirmed by offers of oil and gas to Morgan Stanley, and offers of oil concessions to BTG Pactual. This is more than mere coincidence, I believe.
Now all the gossip makes sense. There’s this journalist in Spain named Marta González. She blogs for Hola, the Spanish gossip church. She was married to Miguel Palomo Danko, son of Palomo Linares, the famous bullfighter. Linares started dating Lilia López, mother of Alejandro Betancourt (CEO of Derwick). López has a daughter, Lilia Jimena, who just so happens to fall in love with Linares’s son. This means that Linares and López are a couple (some say the relationship caused Linares’s divorce), and Linares’s son and López’s daughter are also a couple (some claim this relationship led to the divorce of Palomo Danko). But the important point here is that González was forced to sign a confidentiality agreement with her ex-husband to finalize their divorce. González is forbidden from talking about or disclosing anything regarding Alejandro Betancourt’s business (read: Derwick).
Readers might get lost in all this, but González’s ex-husband (Miguel Palomo Danko) was the broker who managed Derwick’s purchase of that 1,300-hectare hunting ground in Toledo, near Madrid. It’s at that estate where all sorts of parties with friends and potential business partners are organized. It’s in that estate where deals could’ve been made with Rafael Ramírez (CEO of PDVSA), and it was a source from Madrid who first corroborated with gossip the email I received last September regarding Derwick’s involvement in oil.
Followers of Venezuelan corruption will recall the last time a ghost company like Derwick, with no background, attempted to sell oil with the involvement of a rather infamous Republican and how it all turned out (Free Market Petroleum and Jack Kemp). More recently, the marriage of convenience between Al Cárdenas and Derwick ended up costing the former head of ACU much more than he’d like to admit.
Hopefully, when the pending RICO lawsuit against Derwick in the U.S. finally concludes in court, we’ll see the extent of Derwick’s corruption. If that day comes, David Osio, for his part, won’t be able to enjoy those beautiful sunsets perched in his Millennium Tower platform, nor will he be able to launder more of Derwick’s money with his neighbor on the 60th floor…