London 16.10.2012 – Today, at 6:30 pm, I received a very strange phone call. A woman with a strong American accent called to ask if she could speak with the director of Just Good Wine (an online wine retailer I manage) because she was interested in buying wine and champagne. I said I was the director, and she started this nonsense story about a brochure from Just Good Wine that she received during a visit to the UK, asking if I could send her some wine to the United States. That raised my suspicions. After hearing that she might give me a hint on how much wine she would buy, she mentioned wanting to purchase a couple of bottles. As the conversation progressed, I caught on to her game and decided to play along instead of hanging up. I asked her where she got my number, and she said from LinkedIn. She asked if we sold African wines and if I had a store or an office where she could visit or send me an email.
When she hung up, I decided to Google the number she called from: 1 305-443-7682. Guess who that number belongs to? FTI Consulting. This is a company that is supposedly involved in tracking undefined stolen assets. It’s a publicly traded company, don’t forget. The same FTI Consulting which is allegedly cleaning up the online reputations of Moris Beracha, David Osío, Luis Otero, and Pelón Capriles, a real who’s who of the billion-dollar financial corruption scheme going on in Chávez’s Venezuela. Maria-Jose Tobar, Director / Global Risk and Investigations Practice at FTI Consulting, responsible for “… providing clients with critical information and timely solutions in the areas of reputational due diligence, anti-corruption/FCPA compliance, and risk assessment reviews,” recently visited my LinkedIn profile.
But FTI Consulting has been checking (as well as several financial institutions and reputation management firms) my post about Derwick Associates, which nowadays threatens people everywhere, including Bloomberg journalists. So here’s a message: I know you’re reading, so spread the word: if you want to send me stuff, feel free to email me at alek.boyd at gmail.com. And if they want to initiate legal proceedings, well, they can join the line or talk to Majed Khalil Mazjoub and his team; maybe they can all rally against me.
Don’t think for a second that your crafty firms are going to silence me. As Setty argues in his post, these attempts to silence perfectly legitimate criticism won’t achieve anything. News that the bolichicos are spending fortunes on hunting estates where Spain’s elite once played is now public knowledge, and there’s more to come. Hugo Chávez may have won another six-year term (“six more years to keep looting Venezuela,” Betancourt López and others might think), but don’t be fooled; regardless of ties to Javier Alvarado, Rodolfo Sanz, Rafael Ramírez, and Chávez’s own brother, Adán, the world is becoming a very small place for thieves. Moreover, there are plenty of accusations against Betancourt’s activities and his involvement in other scams in Venezuela, like the CVG account with Gazprombank in Lebanon, from which $500 million disappeared, transferred by Betancourt to the head of CVG, Rodolfo Sanz. To make matters worse, the initial investigation by César Batiz regarding the outrageous multi-million-dollar price gouging by Derwick Associates just received praise from the Press and Society Institute, during a gathering of Latin American investigative journalists. Even the chavista justice seems to have caught up with the man from Derwick…
UPDATE 19.11.2012: while publishing another article about Derwick Associates today, I noticed some strange things about it:
Maria-Jose Tobar from FTI Consulting deleted her LinkedIn profile after she was fired;
Venepiramides, a blog seemingly unrelated to Derwick or FTI Consulting, deleted the post about David Osio and Moris Beracha which registered hundreds of sites to address negative PR appearing in Google searches;
WikiAntiCorrupcion.org, the site accused of defamation in a Florida lawsuit by Derwick Associates, first admitted to me in an email that it had been hacked, then the entire site and all references to Derwick Associates were removed…