Federico Alves, Econ.
@federicoalves
Delay of Ships: The New Corruption Scheme of Pdvsa
The main beneficiary was Pdvsa’s Vice President of Trade and Quality Supply, Colonel Antonio Pérez Suárez, who had been collaborating with Erik Roveta, an Italian residing in Athens, from the brokerage service company Sernavimar SRL. This company provided and managed all the ships for Alessandro Bazzoni and Joaquín Leal Jiménez, who partnered with Greek shipowners (Diamantis Diamantidis, George Moundreas, Panagis Zissimatos, among others) to lease the ships to Alex Saab, Álvaro Pulido, Alejandro Arroyo, Majed Khalil, and Miguel Silva.
At its peak, Pdvsa’s oil fleet consisted of 21 ships, 13 of which flew the Venezuelan flag and 8 were foreign but owned by Venezuelan capital.
Prior to the sanctions on the oil industry, these ships operated normally: transporting gasoline and extracting oil from the industry’s inventories.
The ships were always supposed to pick up the product, but unable to maintain its fleet, Pdvsa increasingly relied on foreign vessels, leaving PDV Marina as a graveyard. This was the result of the inability to keep the fleet operational and to cope with the departure of professional crews, who abandoned an industry overwhelmed by a lack of competitiveness against foreign competitors.
Pdvsa had already implemented a corruption scheme that wasted billions of dollars in the construction of 18 ships, in a shipyard project that was never initiated, in overpriced purchases of four vessels from a Japanese company, and in charters without documentation. Additionally, there were lost opportunity costs due to stranded ships, budget overruns in tankers, boats, and tugs, and uncontrolled hiring. However, the new method that drained resources from Pdvsa was the delays in ports attributed to clients.
In a way, the current beneficiaries of the Pdvsa Trade and Supply Mafia, along with others who had been in the business for years, such as Alex Saab, Álvaro Pulido, Alejandro Arroyo, Majed Khalil, and Miguel Silva, were making profits, but they were also feeding a larger structure.
The key player was Pdvsa’s Vice President of Trade and Quality Supply, Colonel Antonio Pérez Suárez, who had been collaborating with Erik Roveta for the last two years. Roveta supplied and managed ships for Alessandro Bazzoni and Joaquín Leal Jiménez, who, partnered with Greek shipowners, ended up leasing the vessels to Alex Saab and others.
The Ship Mafia
The modus operandi consisted of Rovetta and Pérez Suárez quickly loading the first ships for the customer to expedite the departure. While the ships were in international waters, they encouraged clients (whether Alejandro Arroyo, Miguel Silva, or anyone else) via Erik Roveta to lease more vessels, using the load of the first ones as collateral. The problem was that when those ships arrived in Venezuela, Colonel Pérez Suárez delayed the discharge, creating extraordinary waits that justified keeping the product of the first ship to cover the delays of the second or third.
The delay of a VLLC ship can cost up to $150,000 per day, and the wait could last up to 20 days, which meant they could end up paying up to $5 million per ship. A VLLC can carry 2 million barrels.
The clients were the intermediaries.
Some of the notorious vessels involved in this scheme were Cecilia, Kelly, Voyager, Berlina, Ada, Nikel, Delta, Ndros, and Gent. The companies involved included Swiss Oil Trading SA, Libre Abordo SA, Schlager Business, Group SdRL, Cosmo Resources PTE Ltd, Montmagastre Ventures Limited, Walker International DWC LLC, United Petroleo Corp, Five Oceans Ltd, Misil Group Ltd, and Grupo Iveex Insaat.
The fact is that a VLLC ship, under normal circumstances without delays, costs $20 million to charter due to Venezuela being a sanctioned country. Under normal conditions, the same ship chartered for Colombia, for instance, would cost $10 million.
Pérez Suárez gained from Venezuelan intermediaries, who received the product (a loaded VLLC could cost up to $70 million), and also from the shipowners, who had to pay up to $2 million per ship in commissions, a result of the delays that could reach up to 20 and 30 days.
Previously, under Pdvsa without sanctions, the delay costs would be deducted by the state, but under sanctions, the delay penalties were paid to the shipowners.
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