Do readers remember Adam Kaufmann? The former prosecutor from the New York District Attorney’s Office and lawyer for Derwick Associates, who officially stated in the Wall Street Journal, “We are a transparent company and have nothing to hide”? Well, vindication sure is a b****, isn’t it, Adam? It turns out someone leaked documents directly from Derwick Associates’ office in Caracas, and what did we find about this “transparent company”? We uncovered a purchase order of $277 million from BARIVEN (a subsidiary of PDVSA), directed to Pedro Trebbau (one of Derwick Associates’ top executives) for a group of turbines. We also found a “Equipment Purchase Agreement” of $207 million between Alejandro Betancourt (another executive at Derwick Associates) and Jeff Canon from Energy Parts Solution (a division of ProEnergy Services). What else did we discover? Both documents refer to the same equipment and share the same date: December 30, 2009. This means, in Kaufmann’s own words, it is “transparent” that in concurrent transactions that took place on the same day, Derwick Associates embezzled $70 million from BARIVEN. Take that, Adam, to the discovery, buddy!
UPDATE: This morning I received a link to an article (in Spanish) about another agreement worth $66 million between Jeff Canon’s Energy Parts Solution and CORPOELEC, which transparently outlines how Canon’s company paid $9.3 million in commissions to Omar Petit ($1.3 million) and Khaled ($8 million). Longtime readers of my blogs might recall who that Khaled could be. But the interesting point is the record of that bribe payment in the price summary provided by Canon’s Energy Parts Solution (see below). How will Jeff Canon justify/explain to U.S. authorities currently investigating those payments in his ProEnergy company? Furthermore, if evidence of bribe payments has already surfaced in a different agreement, who can believe that Canon, and/or Betancourt, and/or Trebbau, and/or any other partner in his place, did not engage in the exact same practice of bribing Venezuelan officials to secure no-bid contracts? Derwick claims in its defense in various lawsuits that all contracts made with the Venezuelan state were clean, open, public, and legitimate, despite the lack of any evidence to support such a claim. Derwick could very well have been contracted under special circumstances (emergency decree), allowing officials to grant contracts directly, without much fuss. But if that were the case, the question—considering Derwick’s absolutely unverifiable history—is: if not through nepotism and bribery, how were they awarded 12 contracts worth billions directly?