London 16.10.2012 – Today, at 6:30 pm, I received a very odd phone call. A lady with a very thick American accent called to ask if she could talk to the director of Just Good Wine (an online wine retailer that I run), for she was interested in buying wine and champagne. I said I was the director, and she started with this strange story about a leaflet from Just Good Wine that she got during a visit to the UK, and she wanted to know whether I could send her some wine over to the US. That put me on guard. After hearing that I could upon receiving from her an indication of how much wine she would be purchasing, she said she would be interested in buying a couple bottles. As the conversation went on, I realized what she was up to and decided to go along with it, rather than hanging up. I asked her where she had gotten my number from, and she said from LinkedIn. She asked if we sold African wines, and then inquired if I had a store or an office where she could go or send me some mail.
When she hung up, I decided to Google the number from where she called: 1 305-443-7682. Guess who that number belongs to? FTI Consulting. This is a company which is meant to be -among other things- in the business of tracing stolen assets. A publicly traded company, let’s not forget. The same FTI Consulting that, supposedly, is cleaning the online reputation of Moris Beracha, David Osío, Luis Otero, and Pelón Capriles, a veritable who’s who of the multibillion-dollar, financial corruption racket going on in Chavez’s Venezuela. Maria-Jose Tobar, Director / Global Risk and Investigations Practice at FTI Consulting, who is responsible for «…providing clients with critical insight and timely solutions in the areas of reputational due diligence, anti-corruption/FCPA compliance and risk assessment reviews» visited my LinkedIn profile recently.
But FTI Consulting has been visiting (as well as several financial institutions and reputation management firms) my post about Derwick Associates, who these days are threatening people all over, even Bloomberg’s 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, my address is alek.boyd at gmail.com. And if you want to issue legal proceedings, join the queue, or talk to Majed Khalil Mazjoub and his people; perhaps you can all gang up against me.
Don’t think for a minute that your sneaky undertakings are going to silence me. As Setty argues in his post, these attempts at silencing perfectly legitimate criticism aren’t going to achive anything. The news of Bolichicos spending fortunes in hunting farms where Spain’s powerful used to play, are now in the public domain, and there’s more to come. Hugo Chavez may well have won another six-year term («six more years to continue looting Venezuela» Betancourt Lopez et al might think), but fool yourselves not; regardless of connections to Javier Alvarado, Rodolfo Sanz, Rafael Ramírez, and Chavez’s own brother Adán, the world is becoming a very small place indeed for crooks. Besides, it’s not like there’s a shortage of accusations against Betancourt’s activities and involvement in other scams in Venezuela, such as the Gazprombank’s CVG account in Lebanon, from where $500 million that Betancourt wired to CVG’s chief Rodolfo Sanz disappeared. To add insult to injury, Cesar Batiz’s initial investigation into the blatant multibillion-dollar overcharge of power plants by Derwick Associates has just been praised by the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, in a gathering of Latin American investigative journalists. Even chavista justice seems to have caught up with the Derwick man…
UPDATE 19.11.2012: while I was publishing another article on Derwick Associates today, I’ve noticed a few odd things about this one:
FTI Consulting’s Maria-Jose Tobar has deleted her LinkedIn profile after I ousted her; Venepiramides, a blog seemingly unrelated to either Derwick or FTI Consulting, has deleted the post about David Osio and Moris Beracha having registered hundreds of sites to manage negative PR appearing in Google searches; WikiAntiCorrupcion.org, the site accused of libel in a Florida lawsuit by Derwick Associates, first admitted to me via email that it had been hacked, then the whole site and all references to Derwick Associates were taken down…