Bloomberg Politics reported Wednesday on a “previously undisclosed,” and fortunately never executed, plan by Venezuela to evade international sanctions and slip banned Syrian oil into the United States for sale.
The idea was to use a Russian shell company to help Venezuela purchase Syrian oil at a discounted price. The oil would then be refined at Citgo’s facility in Aruba and distributed to gas stations in the United States and elsewhere.
The plan reportedly went well beyond blue-sky discussions. Bloomberg Politics describes a substantial volume of email correspondence between Syrian and Venezuelan officials, including executives at Citgo, which is the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned petroleum and natural gas company.
One of those documents was a 2012 letter to Syria’s ambassador to Venezuela from Venezuelan oil trade Wilmer Ruperti, who explicitly stated the goal of avoiding “the boycott that has been implemented by the United States of America and the European Community.”
Syrian oil was banned in response to dictator Bashar Assad’s brutal crackdown on political dissidents in 2011, which blossomed into the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Bloomberg Politics suggests the Venezuela-Syria scheme “indicates the extent to which the two pariah nations are willing to go to evade international rules and antagonize global powers.”
Ruperti claimed in a telephone interview that it was better seen as an indication of the extent to which everyone involved was willing to go to make piles of money, which is rather unbecoming for someone who used to stamp his documents with the slogan, “Socialist fatherland, we will win and we will live.”
Exposure of the scheme is expected to impact politics in Aruba, which has elections coming up in September. One lawmaker quoted by Bloomberg Politics noted that Aruba’s economy relies heavily upon tourism, which would be negatively impacted if Aruba became part of a system to help Syria evade international sanctions.
The affair loops into American politics because Citgo made a $500,000 donation to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, and because Russia’s oil company Rosneft might end up owning Venezuela’s PDVSA oil company soon, and by extension PDVSA’s Citgo infrastructure in the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department may ultimately be called upon to block the deals that could give Russia an ownership stake in Citgo, through which the bulk of America’s huge oil purchases from Venezuela flow.
There are concerns that this deal is just one example of troubling cooperation between dangerous Middle Eastern powers and Latin American nations. Then there are those who fear Venezuela is just a few more demonstrations and violent crackdowns away from becoming Syria. Such concerns prompted the United States to call for U.N. Security Council consultations on Venezuela last week.
The starving Venezuelan people will not be pleased to learn their socialist government was working on a conspiracy to make a few big shots filthy rich by helping the Butcher of Damascus escape sanctions imposed at the beginning of a conflict that threatens to destabilize the entire world.
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