By Elizabeth Fuentes
“Alessandro Bazzoni is an Italian entrepreneur, very friendly and pleasant, who has been heavily involved in polo for several years, starting with his early ventures in the United States and the Dominican Republic…” he stated in an interview with the Argentine magazine Prensa Polo, where he expressed his desire to receive The Queen’s Cup (a global Polo tournament) from Queen Elizabeth II: “Of course!,” he replied. The Queen’s Cup is unique. And the Queen is a very pleasant person, an extraordinary woman who knows a lot about horses,” following his team’s competition against the Prince’s team in 2021.
The same year, Bazzoni was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury due to corrupt practices in the transportation of Venezuelan oil and evading the sanctions imposed on Venezuela by using his companies and ships for this purpose. In fact, the U.S. agency also sanctioned six of his oil tankers and 14 companies, all linked to Bazzoni and his associates, who are now accused of corruption not only in the United States but in Venezuela for belonging to the web of criminals that defrauded PDVSA of an amount exceeding three billion dollars.
Alessandro Bazzoni resides in Lugano, Sweden, and is married to Siri Evjemo-Nysveen, a Norwegian finance expert he met in the Dominican Republic during a polo tournament. However, he stopped using social media the same year he was added to the U.S. blacklist, as well as abandoning the website he launched under his name, www.alessandrobazzoni.com, to clean his image. “It’s a personal website to share some thoughts and links on topics close to my heart, including Africa and emerging markets, energy, philanthropy, and logistics.” While he was described as a businessman “with interests in Africa and Latin America,” there is no information on his website regarding his four companies: Elemental Oil, based in Malta, Elemento Solutions Limited, registered in the UK, AMG S.A.S, and Serigraphiclab, the last two registered in Italy and allegedly involved in the corruption scheme executed with Colonel Antonio Pérez Suárez, Bazzoni’s now-detained partner in the company United Petróleo Corp, which they both used as a front to pose as the Chinese company United Petroleum & Chemicals Co. LTD, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Sinopec Corp, one of the buyers of Venezuelan oil. It is estimated that together they defrauded the Venezuelan oil company for more than 400 million dollars.
As the icing on the cake, the Italian is also linked to Alex Saab and the Mexican Joaquín Leal, who, as thoroughly investigated by the portal www.armando info.com, utilized shell companies registered in Mexico, Russia, or the United Arab Emirates, to market shipments of millions of barrels of crude oil from PDVSA at exorbitant prices in euros.
According to the Department of the Treasury, this group purchased crude oil from the state-owned PDVSA at below-market prices and took care of transporting it and finding buyers thousands of kilometers away from Venezuelan shores in “off-the-radar” operations. Money that they did not deliver to PDVSA, like the rest involved in the multimillion-dollar scam.
For now, taking more caution than usual, Alessandro Bazzoni and his wife maintain a discreet silence on their social media, where only traces of their polo competitions remain along with a few notes about charity work done by lovers of the sport, a perfect activity to hide behind the money.