President Donald Trump has called the deal granting the US control of strategic Venezuelan oil fields "the biggest in history". North American Blue Energy Partners (Nabep), a company little known outside the South American country, will oversee the production and sale of 17 oil fields containing about 65bn barrels of crude. The agreement has raised eyebrows to say the least.
And at the heart of it is Alejandro Betancourt López, the Venezuelan oil baron who heads the Barbados-registered firm. The 46-year-old has a history of doing business with the Venezuelan government since the time of the late President Hugo Chávez. But he has also found himself under investigation in five different countries.
He has previously denied wrongdoing and has never been convicted of a crime. So who is the fixer picked to deliver on Trump's oil abundance plan? Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López was born in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas in February 1980 into a middle-class family.
A graduate of Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, he is estimated to be worth around $2.6bn (£1.9bn). Although his CV attributes his success to his "entrepreneurial spirit", Venezuelan journalists who have followed his career maintain that it all began with the connections he made in the classrooms of the Instituto Cumbres de Caracas, a private religious school in the Venezuelan capital. Venezuelan journalist Alek Boyd, who has been tracking Betancourt since 2011, said that the businessman became a close school friend of Javier Alvarado Pardi, the son of the man who would later become president of Electricidad de Caracas, vice-minister of energy, and an executive at Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) – the state-run oil company.
"In 2009, at the height of the electricity crisis, Alvarado introduced Betancourt and his partners to his father and assured him they could solve the problem… despite having no experience in the electricity sector," said Boyd. Around that time, Derwick Associates, the engineering firm that Betancourt founded with a cousin, received 12 government contracts, awarded without bidding, for a total of $5bn. Shortly afterwards, he and other young entrepreneurs doing business with the Venezuelan government were nicknamed "bolichicos", a slang term combining the words Bolivarian – referring to Chavez's socialist revolution - and chico, meaning boy.
"It's a term coined by the media, used to describe a group of young people whose only commonality is their success," Jon Sale, the businessman's lawyer in the US, told BBC News Mundo. Derwick Associates claimed to have completed all of its electrification projects. But anti-corruption organisations such as Transparency Venezuela and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project allege that several projects were either not finished or were carried out incorrectly.
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