Keeping track of website updates (Arevenca/Madasi, Derwick, Ovarb)

One fun thing I like to do is watch when web pages are changed or removed. As I look into possibly untoward behaviour in the oil industry, I keep coming across situations where information disappears from the Internet. I give you three recent examples. Each one is minor, and I don’t want to speculate on people’s motives. I have no problem with privacy. I just don’t like memory holes, where information of public value was public and then disappears. So I am preserving and pointing out a few tidbits.

1. Madasi Oil, a trading company in Puerto Rico that offers such products as JP54 and D2, updated its “press” page to omit mentions of Arevenca.

It used to say:

MADASI OIL President and CEO Marcos Da silva Castro, Headed a Meeting at AREVENCA Headquarters in Aruba with the purpose of discussing AEREVENCA Plans for world wide development. President Da Silva met with AREVENCA President and CEO Francisco Javier Gonzalez. As part of MADASI team, present were AREVENCA Partners Joel Racet, Javier Estevez. Also present were Aaron Jay Fosset from Fosset and associates and Miguel D. Lausell Attorney at Law. MADASI is The exclusive Business representative of AREVENCA in The USA and Puerto Rico.

In a couple phone interviews in recent months, Mr. Da Silva has told me he was a victim of Arevenca, like so many others. But rather than go public condemning Arevenca for scamming his oil company, Madasi has just deleted that text, along with the photos of Madasi people meeting with Arevenca in Aruba. I didn’t download the whole site, unfortunately, and Madasi has the remarkable good fortune that it’s also not archived at Archive.org or anywhere else on the open internet.

Madasi has also deleted all mentions of “Gatrex” from its website. Gatrex had glowing praise in Madasi’s brochure from January of last year: “GATREX is one of the biggest oil derivates trading company in the world, with the most reliable trade record in this industry as of today, this incredible joint venture has put MADASI in the position to build one of the most important Oil derivates networks in Latin America, as its exclusive partner in the area for marketing its products.”

Now, Gatrex is gone, replaced by “Shell, Corp” and “Conoco Phillips.” I have archived the old Madesi packet for your reading pleasure, in case you want to compare it with the new one.

I e-mailed Marcos da Silva, one of the principals of Madasi Oil, to ask why he had deleted the references from his site. He said, “Por que Por sus, actos desaparecieron por si solos.” That is, “Because by their acts, they disappeared on their own.” I wrote again to ask for details and he said, “Todavía la historia no se escribe para AREVENCA , Gatrex dejo de ser, pero AREVENCA sigue pero sus acciones lo llevan al texto bíblico ( por su hechos os conoceréis )
No puedo hablar mas ya sabrás cuando la Interpol lo haga publico .”

2. Derwick Associates. I recently reread Cesar Batiz’s masterful investigation into overcharging by US-based suppliers to Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA. Looking for more information about Derwick, I saw something very odd.

The second hit when searching for this company, that “Devil’s Excrement” post, gave an error: 404 not found. The page wasn’t there. Luckily Google still had it in the cache. Here’s a PDF of the cached version, unfortunately missing the comments. I’m sure the Devil had a good reason to take down the post, but hey, I have a good reason to put it back. That being: memory holes scare me. The strange thing about that article is that it doesn’t say anything more damning than what had already been reported. Just that Derwick is a new company based out of an address in Ft Lauderdale airport and that it got a lot of contracts for Venezuela electricity plants. Not much that Batiz didn’t also say in his story, which is reposted all over the web (albeit in Spanish — remind me to translate that). The only new thing is that they are in a building with US Customs. Which is, I suppose, the kind of thing that gets conspiracy theories flowing.

3. Ovarb. Another one of the companies in Batiz’s report from last year was Ovarb. This is a minor thing, but the Ovarb website was then registered to Ottavio Cautilli, as captured at the time here and also still visible here.

cautilli, ottavio
OVARB INDUSTRIAL, LLC.
283 lockhaven dr. suite 308
houston, Texas 77073
United States
(713) 554-3970 Fax — (281) 821-3930

Looking up the domain info now shows this:

Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration OVARBINDUSTRIAL.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains By Proxy, LLC
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599 Fax — (480) 624-2598

Now there’s nothing wrong with changing to a more anonymous domain record. But Cautilli has been a bit of a mystery, since his name doesn’t show up anywhere else in Ovarb Industrial’s filings or website. It’s the kind of thing that makes me look closer — for example, at his marriage. More on that soon. I wrote Cautilli to ask for comments and he hasn’t written back.