Ysmel Serrano, ex-Vice President of Venezuela’s state-run PDVSA is the latest top-ranking official to be slapped with charges as investigations progress into the billion-dollar oil scandal. He served in the post and acted as trade chief between 2017 and 2018.
Serrano is also closely tied to Venezuela’s former Energy Minister Tareck El Assami who stepped down from the post to make way for the probe.
19 out of 21 charged in PDVSA’s missing US$21.2B scandal | OilNOW
Venezuela’s information minister Freddy Nanez made the announcement on Twitter. Another PDVSA VP, Antonio Perez Suarez was also previously arrested.
Over 170 raids and 61 arrests have come out of the corruption case involving PDVSA and other state entities, according to figures by Venezuela’s attorney general Tarek Saab.
Diego Rivera Rivota, research associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told the Energy Advisor in a Q&A published on April 7 that “…the very public exposure of the financial holes from opaque international networks and blatant corruption further sheds light on the extremely complicated situation of the company.”
The case surrounds the missing US$21.2 billion in payments to PDVSA for oil shipments made to “little known middlemen” after the country was hit with US sanctions. This led to big price discounts and problems with payments affecting its cash flow.
