Start the week right with this exposé on anonymous corporations

Ken Silverstein, one of the great long-standing US investigative reporters, has aimed his razor skills and obsessive memory upon the offshore anonymous corporation game, and especially the law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co., of Panama. A tour de force of reporting, fully worth reading, at this link.

who makes these fictitious entities possible? To conduct business, shell companies like Drex need a registered agent, sometimes an attorney, who files the required incorporation papers and whose office usually serves as the shell’s address. This process creates a layer between the shell and its owner, especially if the dummy company is filed in a secrecy haven where ownership information is guarded behind an impenetrable wall of laws and regulations. In Makhlouf’s case—and, I discovered, in the case of various other crooked businessmen and international gangsters—the organization that helped incorporate his shell company and shield it from international scrutiny was a law firm called Mossack Fonseca…

Since the 70s the law firm has expanded operations and now works with affiliated offices in 44 countries, including the Bahamas, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Brazil, Jersey, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands, and—perhaps most troubling—the US, specifically the states of Wyoming, Florida, and Nevada.

Mossack Fonseca, of course, is not alone in setting up shell companies used by the world’s crooks and tax evaders. Across the globe, there are vast numbers of competing firms, and many of them register shells that are every bit as shady as Drex. Proof of this includes the case of Viktor Bout, who, in the 1990s, peddled arms to the Taliban through a Delaware-registered shell. More recently, in 2010, a man named Khalid Ouazzani pleaded guilty to using a Kansas City, Missouri, firm called Truman Used Auto Parts to move money for Al Qaeda.

Scattered news accounts and international investigations have pointed to Mossack Fonseca as one of the widest-reaching creators of shell companies in the world, but it has, until now, used an array of legal and accounting tricks that have allowed it and its clients to mostly fly under the radar.

(The company disputes this claim and asserted in an email that “there is no court or government record that has ever identified Mossack Fonseca as the creator of ‘shell’ companies. Anything tying our group to ‘criminal activity’ is unfounded, inasmuch as we have not actually been notified of the existence of any legal proceeding… thus far.”)

That just gives a hint, please go read it, it’s the sort of education that you need if you want to know how power and money really work in this world.

The mysterious winners of a $644 million arbitration against PDVSA

CORRECTION 21 October 2015:

I have learned that the billion-dollar contract referred to in this report was not just for ship rental. It was also for the provision of ship crews, divers, and geotechnical engineers, and other professionals for the full project of pipeline mapping, repair and replacement.

AND AN UPDATE: Pdvsa said in its 2014 annual report that it paid this award.

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PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company, released financial statements last month. One of the more remarkable items in there was a $644 million loss for an arbitration award in a case that I had never heard about before — and no Venezuela expert I’ve talked to had heard about, either. This is all that PDVSA has ever disclosed about the case:

In November 2013, the award related to the arbitration request filed by Gulmar Offshore Middle East LLC and Kaplan Industry Inc. was issued against PDVSA, corresponding to early unilateral termination of contract by PDVSA. The award established a compensation of $644 million.

That is a tremendous amount of money. I wrote last week in REDD Intelligence (subscription needed to read) about what this surprise means for Venezuela’s country risk. Here, I’m going to focus instead on what we know about the companies that won this money.

I had only heard of Gulmar Offshore as one of a long list of companies with assets that Venezuela expropriated back in 2009. I had never heard of Kaplan, as it was misspelled in the initial announcement (good English analysis here) as “Kapplan.”

Gulmar was, and is, a company that leases vessels for undersea projects in the oil industry. It was later purchased by Oaktree Capital Management (more on them later). Back in 2009, I had a hard time reaching them; for this article the one phone number I found didn’t even ring and Oaktree’s lawyer didn’t respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

Kaplan is more difficult to pin down. Bloomberg said that Kaplan was a gas-cylinder manufacturer from New Jersey. Oops! That’s Kaplan Industries.

Kaplan Industry website, unchanged since 2010

No, this was Kaplan Industry. At the top of its web page, it says it’s “An engineering design firm.” Then in the text, it’s “a leading independent international development consultancy.” The confusion may have come about as the website was thrown together, almost entirely plagiarized from other sites. The home page is from Adam Smith International, some of the “About” page is from Secunda Canada, and the line “Having fun inspires creativity, which rouses fresh ideas that we take to our clients” is from Zain Public Relations. Yes, having fun inspires creativity. And nothing demonstrates creativity like “copy-paste.”

No one answered at any of the three phone numbers listed on the website. Company president Vince Hulan didn’t respond to e-mails sent to the address on the website, including one e-mail asking specific questions about the plagiarism and other concerns raised in this article. Four lawyers connected to the company and its principals also failed to return calls and e-mails.

Venezuela fuel imports update: the derroche continues

Venezuela is buying ever more finished motor fuel from the USA. In January, it bought a record 113,000 barrels a day of the stuff. Meanwhile, it halted purchases of MTBE and special naphthas, which I previously referred to as the “good” imports. It’s grim.

Source: US EIA