UPDATE: I learn that The Devil’s Excrement and Armas del Coronel blogs had these documents years ago. I missed them at the time. Credit where due!
Oil geeks and Venezuela-watchers might remember that in early 2010, a delegation of Venezuelans went to China to request a $40 billion loan and came back with a new $4 billion loan. This was the first part of the ongoing lending by China of money to Venezuela to be repaid in crude oil and fuel oil. That in turn led to new agreements in 2011. These deals have gotten a lot of attention, but much of what has been said has been poorly backed by information about the real content of the Venezuela-China deals.
Turns out, a collection of financial documents about these deals has been online since late 2011. Here you go, yours at no extra charge. Most of them appear to be late-phase drafts, rather than signed documents. But they are certainly close enough to final that they can give people discussing these deals a bit of grounding in reality, rather than the just making stuff up.
Included in this collection:
A trip report for President Chávez, describing exactly what happened in Beijing on the trip from February 2 to 4, 2010. Continue reading
Setty's notebook 