Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Scoop: Inside Trump's naval blockade obsession
Jonathan Swan.
Axios.
August 18, 2019.
President Trump has suggested to national security officials that the U.S. should station Navy ships along the Venezuelan coastline to prevent goods from coming in and out of the country, according to 5 current and former officials who have either directly heard the president discuss the idea or have been briefed on Trump's private comments.
Driving the news: Trump has been raising the idea of a naval blockade periodically for at least a year and a half, and as recently as several weeks ago, these officials said.
They added that to their
knowledge the Pentagon hasn't taken this extreme idea seriously, in part
because senior officials believe it's impractical, has no legal basis and would
suck resources from a Navy that is already stretched to counter China and Iran.
Trump has publicly alluded to a naval blockade of Venezuela. Earlier this month he answered "Yes, I am" when a reporter asked whether he was mulling such a move. But he hasn't elaborated on the idea publicly.
In private, Trump has expressed himself more vividly, these current and former officials say.
"He literally just said we should get the ships out there and do a naval embargo," said one source who's heard the president’s comments. "Prevent anything going in."
"I'm
assuming he's thinking of the Cuban missile crisis," the source added.
"But Cuba is an island and Venezuela is a massive coastline. And Cuba we
knew what we were trying to prevent from getting in. But here what are we
talking about? It would need massive, massive amounts of resources; probably
more than the U.S. Navy can provide."
Hawkish GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, has a different perspective about the value of a show of military force. "I've been saying for months that when the Venezuelan military sees an American military presence gathering force, this thing ends pretty quickly," he told me.
Behind the scenes: In recent months, an alleged drug lord in President Nicolás Maduro's inner circle has reached out to the White House through intermediaries, according to administration officials and other sources briefed on the outreach.
Diosdado
Cabello, an alleged drug lord with substantial power inside the Venezuelan
political and military elite, has been communicating through emissaries with
National Security Council official Mauricio Claver-Carone, these sources said.
These sources did not know what messages, if any, Claver-Carone had sent back
to Cabello through these intermediaries.
A senior
administration official added that members of various centers of power within
Venezuela, including Cabello, have been reaching out through emissaries to U.S.
government officials.
Trump
administration officials view Cabello as an important power broker, and some
say the Venezuelan opposition's April 30 uprising would have succeeded if
Cabello had been involved.
Some State
Department officials are concerned about the idea of communicating with an
alleged drug lord, per a source familiar with the situation. It's also the case
that some administration officials have assessed that Cabello purportedly
sending messages is a positive sign and suggests Maduro's circle is gradually
cracking.
The big picture: Thus far, Trump has sought to strangle dictator Maduro with escalating sanctions. Senior administration officials say they are focused on diplomacy and economic pressure and have little interest in military options, though they won't rule them out.
Trump is deeply frustrated that the Venezuelan opposition has failed to topple Maduro — more than 3 months after a failed uprising, and more than 6 months after Trump led the world in recognizing Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
Trump has had good reason to
be frustrated, current and former officials said. For the first year and a bit
of his presidency, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson and chief of staff John Kelly collaborated to ignore or stymie what
they judged to be dangerous requests from Trump. This included, in Mattis'
case, a request for military options to topple Maduro, according to sources
with direct knowledge of Trump's unfulfilled asks.
Trump would
berate his former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, asking him why he
hadn't produced the Venezuela military options he'd requested. But McMaster
wasn't the obstacle to producing the options for Venezuela; it was Mattis,
according to sources with direct knowledge.
McMaster
grew so exasperated with Mattis that around September 2017, he sent him a memo
saying the president had requested new options for Venezuela.
In the
classified memo, which has never been reported on until now, McMaster gave
Mattis a deadline to present the military options, according to sources
familiar with the memo's contents. Mattis ignored the memo and blew past the
deadline, these sources said.
This
dynamic changed once John Bolton and Mike Pompeo took over.
The bottom line: Trump has no
interest in committing U.S. ground troops to Venezuela, according to senior
administration officials, but he has told them to keep piling pressure on
Maduro and to look for creative ways to help Guaidó force Maduro out of power.
China CNPC suspends Venezuelan oil loading, worried about U.S. sanctions: sources
Chen Aizhu, Marianna Parraga.
Reuters.
August 19, 2019
China National Petroleum Corp, a leading buyer of Venezuelan oil, has halted August loadings following the latest U.S. sanctions on the South American exporter, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Monday.
The Trump administration in early August froze all Venezuelan government assets in the United States and U.S. officials ratcheted up threats against companies that do business with Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or PDVSA.
“Trump’s executive order gave a directive for the follow-up sanction measures that shall be announced by the U.S. Treasury... CNPC is worried that the company is likely to be hit by the secondary sanctions,” said one source.
A CNPC spokesman declined to comment. PDVSA and Venezuela’s information ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A second person, an executive with a large marketer of Venezuelan oil in China, said his company had been notified of the suspension.
“We were told that Chinaoil will not load any oil in August. We don’t know what will happen after,” he said.
Chinaoil is the trading vehicle of CNPC that buys most Venezuelan crude under term contracts and is one of Caracas’ top clients. PetroChina, another of CNPC’s subsidiaries, also is a direct buyer of Venezuelan oil. Both were struggling to charter vessels willing to load at the OPEC-member nation’s ports due to sanctions, according to traders.
The suspension caught PDVSA by surprise, according to one of the sources, but it could be temporary if CNPC is able to put in place a new arrangement excluding units involved in businesses with the United States. A new deal has not yet been reached, two separate sources with knowledge of the decision said.
The sources declined to be identified as they are not authorized to speak to the media.
Most deliveries of Venezuelan oil and refined products to CNPC’s units are intended to monetize billions of dollars lent by China to Venezuela through oil-for-loan pacts. PDVSA has never failed to deliver crude to China to pay off debts, although refinancing and grace periods have been agreed upon over the last decade to ease the debt burden.
CNPC will wait for more guidelines from the U.S. Treasury before further moves in dealing with Venezuelan oil, one of the sources said.
The suspension followed recent
communications between the U.S. and Chinese governments, including a meeting
between U.S. embassy officials in Beijing and top management at CNPC, the
source added.
The White House imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry in January in an effort to unseat socialist President Nicolas Maduro, whose re-election in 2018 is viewed by much of the Western Hemisphere as illegitimate.
The executive order Trump
issued on Aug. 5 did not explicitly sanction non-U.S. companies that do
business with Venezuela’s state-run PDVSA, including partners in crude
operations like France’s Total SA, Norway’s Equinor ASA, as well as Russian and
Chinese customers.
However, the order threatens to freeze U.S. assets of any person or company determined to have “materially assisted” the Venezuelan government.
Beijing has become
increasingly pragmatic in recent years in an amply supplied global oil market
and as Venezuela’s economy plunged deeper into recession.
For the first six months of
this year, China imported 8.67 million tonnes of crude oil from Venezuela, or
roughly 350,000 barrels per day, about 3.5% of its total imports, according to
Chinese customs data.
In July, Venezuela exported
563,000 bpd of crude and fuel to China, mostly through CNPC and Russia’s
Rosneft, according to the PDVSA’s internal data and Refinitiv Eikon vessel
tracking data. The nation is now Venezuela’s primary destination for its oil.
‘Silent Revolution’ to Fuel Brazil M&A Business for Years
Cristiane Lucchesi Pablo
Rosendo Gonzalez.
Bloomberg.
August 19, 2019
A “silent revolution” in Brazil will drive the mergers-and-acquisitions business for the next three years as the government privatizes state-owned assets at a pace far exceeding early estimates, according to one of the nation’s top M&A advisers.
“What we’ve seen so far is nothing compared to what’s yet to come,” Ricardo Lacerda, chief executive officer of investment-banking boutique BR Partners, said in an interview in Sao Paulo. “Even assets that are considered crown jewels will end up being sold.”
‘Silent Revolution’ to Fuel Brazil M&A Business for Years
The government has already unloaded several assets, including the $8.6 billion sale by the state-owned oil giant Petroleo Brasileiro SA of a natural-gas pipeline unit called TAG, the biggest transaction announced this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Still to come are the sale of other Petrobras subsidiaries and oil fields, contributing to the government’s goal of raising at least $20 billion from privatizations this year.
President Jair Bolsonaro has asked economy ministry’s secretary for privatization and divestment, Jose Salim Mattar, to sell at least one state-owned company a week, Mattar said earlier this month. Bolsonaro took office in January, bringing with him an economic team pressing for a full-scale sell-off of state-owned holdings to help balance the budget. Some analysts speculated that Bolsonaro wasn’t committed to the policy, based on his criticism of previous administrations that tried it.
But it’s become clear that the president’s goals are aligned with those of his economic team, said Lacerda, whose 10-year-old firm is predicting record revenue and profit this year.
“The quality of the economic team and its ideological determination to privatize, to reduce the state size, are creating very positive conditions for business,” Lacerda said. “This consensus is very calming for entrepreneurs.”
The number of acquisitions in Brazil jumped to 339 so far this year, 13% more than the same period last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The value of the transactions is 6% lower, at $34.4 billion. Lacerda’s BR Partners, the top M&A adviser in Brazil in the first half of the year, dropped to second for the year through Aug. 16.
Boutique advisers are gaining
market share in M&A over big banks, some of which trimmed their
investment-banking operations in recent years and are now prioritizing equity
underwriting, according to Daniel Wainstein, Greenhill & Co.’s country head
for Brazil. The firm ranks third based on number of deals, with a pipeline
Wainstein called “robust.”
Diogo Aragao, head of Brazil
M&A at Bank of America Corp., said he expects deals in which the government
sells assets in infrastructure sectors including ports, railroads, airports and
logistics. The size of transactions involving the oil and gas industry will
continue to rise, he said.
“Lower interest rates should
fuel the acquisition-finance business, helping consolidation in sectors such as
retail and health care,” Aragao said.
Brazil: New Leaked Conversation Proves Further Conspiracy Against Lula
TeleSUR.
August 19, 2019
New private messages exchanged between the Lava Jato (Car Wash) prosecutors involved in the judicial case against former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were published Monday by his defense attorney, giving more evidence that the leader of the Workers Party was "victim of a conspiracy."
"The messages are directly related with the two clearly corrupted procedures that were initiated in the Federal Court of Curitiba (the Triplex and Sitio case) and inflicted unfair sentenced to Lula," said his lawyers Valeska Texeira Martins and Cristiano Zanin Martins in a press release.
The then-judge Sergio Moro,
now Super Minister of Justice, admitted that Lula received no funds from the
construction company Odebrecht, still the corruption case known as Lava Jato,
"did not take into account the evidence of his testimony that we brought
to the procedure," they added.
As a result, the lawyers
announced that they will send the case to the Committee of Human Rights of the
United Nations in order to annul the sentences against Lula and to open an
investigation about the role of the public officials involved in the
conversations.
The historical leader of the
Brazilian left has been in prison since April 7, 2018, over corruption charges
that media leaks and legal experts have exposed as politically motivated.
Lula ran for president last
year but was blocked from appearing on the ballot by Moro, which was upheld on
appeal. Lula led opinion polls heading into the election, which was won by
far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
Some excerpted conversations
published showed prosecutors discussing how to block journalists from
interviewing Lula in jail during last year's campaign. A message attributed to
one of the prosecutors, Laura Tessler, suggested that such an interview could
help Lula's stand-in on the Workers Party ticket.
On June 25, Brazil's Supreme
Federal Court rejected two appeals that attempted to grant freedom to the former
president. The third motion, which was the Habeas Corpus hearing initiated on
December 2018, was suspended once again and rescheduled for this year’s second
semester.
Operation Car Wash Circumvented Legal Limits to Obtain Personal Tax Data
Ricardo Balthazar & Felipe
Bächtold, Folha and Paula Bianchi & Leandro Demori,
The Intercept Brasil.
August 19, 2019
Operation Car Wash prosecutors
circumvented legal limits to obtain sensitive tax personal data, according to
messages obtained by The Intercept Brasil and analyzed by Folha and the site.
The messages show that members
of the Curitiba task force in Curitiba sought information from Brazil's revenue
service about people it wanted to investigate without a formal request and
court authorization.
To obtain the data,
prosecutors counted on the cooperation of tax auditor Roberto Leonel, who
headed COAF's intelligence area in Curitiba until 2018 and assumed the
presidency of the Financial Activities Control Board (COAF) in the Jair
Bolsonaro (PSL) government.
The messages also show that
the task force established such a close working relationship with Leonel that
they relied on him to verify investigators' hypotheses, without any objective
elements to justify access to data from the tax authorities.
At the beginning of 2016,
prosecutors used this file frequently during investigations into reforms
carried out by contractors at the Atibaia (SP) site frequented by former
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (PT).
From January to March of this
year, the task force asked Leonel to gather information about Lula's
daughter-in-law, the housekeeper, the heritage of her former owners, and
purchases that the wife of the PT leader, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva, would
have made at that time.
The Lava Jato task force in
Curitiba and the Revenue service stated that the exchange of information
between them during investigations is permitted by law and occurs within limits
that respect the taxpayers' guaranteed confidentiality.
Leonel and COAF did not
respond to the report's questions.
Record Number of Fires Burning in Amazon Rainforest
Aug. 21, 2019 06:46AM EST
There are a record number
of wildfires burning
in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil's space
agency has said. Their smoke is visible from space and shrouded the city of São
Paulo in darkness for about an hour Monday afternoon, CBS news reported.
"It was as if the day had
turned into night," São Paulo resident Gianvitor Dias told BBC
News of the incident. "Everyone here commented, because even on rainy
days it doesn't usually get that dark. It was very impressive."
The darkening of São Paulo —
caused when wind carried smoke from fires burning 2,700 kilometers
(approximately 1,678 miles) away — focused international attention on the
fires, as the hashtag #prayforamazonia began to trend on Twitter.
Also on Monday, Brazil's
National Institute for Space Research (INPE) announced that a record number of
fires were burning in the world's largest rainforest, Al Jazeera reported. The agency said that it had spotted
nearly 73,000 fires in the Brazilian Amazon since January, up 83 percent from
the year before. Satellite images have turned up more than 9,500 new fires
since Thursday alone.
The fires also showed up on
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite imagescaptured Aug. 11 and 13. The U.S. agency
said that fire activity in the Amazon had actually been below average this
year. While it was above average in the states of Amazonas and Rondônia, it was
below average in Mato Grosso and Pará.
Smoke from Amazon wildfires
captured in a satellite image Aug. 13.
NASA Earth Observatory
The state of Amazonas declared
an emergency for its south and its capital Manaus on Aug. 9, Reuters reported. The state of Acre, on Brazil's border
with Peru, declared an environmental alert Friday.
Wildfires in the Amazon, which
is an important sink for carbon dioxide, have been increasing in recent years
due to the climate crisis and deforestation, The Washington Post reported.
The uptick in the total number
of fires this year also coincides with the election of far-right
President Jair Bolsonaro, who has promised to open more of the Amazon
to mining and farming. While fires are common during the dry season, they can
also be started illegally to clear land for cattle, and the INPE said the high
number of fires this year could not be blamed exclusively on the climate.
"There is nothing
abnormal about the climate this year or the rainfall in the Amazon region,
which is just a little below average," INPE researcher Alberto Setzer told
Reuters.
But Bolsonaro rejected the
idea that his policies could be to blame. He argued that this was the time of
year called the queimada, when farmers clear their land with fire.
"I used to be called
Captain Chainsaw. Now I am Nero, setting the Amazon aflame. But it is the
season of the queimada," he told reporters, according to Reuters.
The figures from INPE come
weeks after Bolsonaro fired the agency's director after the agency published
dramatic deforestation data that Bolsonaro claimed was false, BBC
News reported. INPE had said that deforestation had increased 88 percent in
June 2019 when compared to the year before. INPE says its data is 95 percent
accurate.
Amazon Deforestation Rate Hits
3 Football Fields Per Minute, Date Confirms http://dlvr.it/R98JsX #Amazon #Deforestation #Trees
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)