The Bloomberg hacks covering Venezuela have recently astonished their audience with a surprising discovery: “Two former Gazprom executives are helping Venezuela maintain its oil flow”:
“GPB Global Resources BV is based in the Netherlands, but is led by Boris Ivanov and Sergey Tagashov, who previously worked for the Russian government. Over the past year, GPB has consistently extracted around 10% of Venezuela’s oil in a joint venture with Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., the state-owned company known as PDVSA. The operation, called Petrozamora SA, is functioning without specific sanctions on the company in the Maracaibo region, which helped establish Venezuela as an oil powerhouse in the 20th century.”
Let’s take a look back: in March 2016, this site published “Derwick Oil & Gas laundering money with Gazprombank through PDVSA,” providing the scoop on GPB Global Resources:
Amsterdam registration documents corroborated the lead: Orlando José Alvarado Moreno, Francisco Convit Guruceaga, Boris Ivanov, and Christophe Gerard are connected to Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V. (company number 52285421). It was registered in March 2011 and at that time was owned by GPB Netfegaz Services. In September 2011, it was transferred to GPB Global Resources, and in September 2012, admitted Derwick’s Convit as a shareholder/director.
No international media referenced this story. In May 2018, a local group of “investigative” journalists “reported” on Derwick’s connection to Ivanov and others through Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V., the front used to form the joint venture Petrozamora with PDVSA.
Bloomberg now “reports”:
GPB was founded in 2011, a year before the creation of Petrozamora. Control of GPB is held by Ivanov and Tagashov, who serve as two of the three CEOs of the company, alongside Vladimir Shvarts, whose focus is on Africa and the Middle East.
Bloomberg does not mention the current activities of Vladimir Shvarts in Sweden, where he has appointed a legal advisor who claims to speak on behalf of Petrozamora and is attempting to misappropriate ~$360 million that Nynas owes to Petrozamora.
Bloomberg asserts that Francisco Convit “was an external director of Petrozamora from 2015 to 2016, according to the Official Bulletin of Venezuela.” This is misleading, to say the least. Convit’s association with Petrozamora did not end in 2016. Amsterdam registration documents related to Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V. indicate that Convit was a director from September 2012 until April 4, 2016, when it appears Alvarado took over the position.
However, Alvarado is simply an employee of Derwick Associates, and in February 2019, he was reprimanding Nynas’s quality manager in Venezuela for deciding to return a shipment to Petrozamora.
Bloomberg deemed it inappropriate to mention that Convit is a fugitive wanted by U.S. justice.
This site has published extensively about Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V. and its “parent” GPB Global Resources since 2016. Even more about Convit, Alvarado et al.
Bloomberg claims that Petrozamora “is operating without specific sanctions on the company…” disregarding that 1) PDVSA and its entities are sanctioned; 2) Nynas requires special licenses from OFAC to carry out a bankruptcy and reorganization process triggered precisely by its business relationships with Petrozamora; 3) GPB Global Resources B.V. and Gazprombank Latin America Ventures B.V. are, in fact, sanctioned entities by the Treasury.
To describe Bloomberg’s reports as low-quality is an understatement. Not only does it distort the narrative and make false and inaccurate claims, but it also fails to cite/attribute information first revealed elsewhere.