Jesus Daniel Romero and William Acosta for Poder & Dinero and FinGuru
Taskin Torlak was preparing his escape from the United States to Turkey at the time of his arrest and was subsequently charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Torlak "conspired to evade U.S. sanctions imposed on Petróleos de Venezuela Sociedad Anónima (PDVSA) by using deception to smuggle oil from the black market out of Venezuela." It is believed that Torlak was using U.S. financial institutions to process transactions directly related to the transport of Venezuelan oil for the benefit of PDVSA. Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. was designated as a "Specially Designated National (SDN)" in January 2019 by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
According to the indictment, Torlak "allegedly led a complex scheme since 2020 to send oil and petroleum products from Venezuela and Iran, renaming and reflagging ships".
The announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice comes after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's significant and embarrassing defeat at the BRICS meeting in Kazan, Russia, last October. Maduro had lobbied intensively and sought support from various BRICS members over the past two years, hoping to be admitted as a permanent member. However, for Maduro's regime, Brazilian President Lula Da Silva demanded that the acts of the presidential elections be made public to prove Maduro's legitimacy, as he allegedly won the presidential elections in July. President Lula made this a condition for Venezuela's admission to BRICS.
According to the investigation, the conspiracy scheme included:
1. Hiding the identities of tankers carrying the fuel by renaming and reflagging the ships.
2. Covering the names of the ships with paint or blankets and turning off the electronics that track the ships' locations for the safety of the ships and their crews.
3. Torlak and his co-conspirators allegedly received tens of millions of dollars from PDVSA as payment for the transport of Venezuelan oil and concealed the ultimate beneficiaries of the transactions related to U.S. financial institutions, which then unwittingly processed the payments in support of the scheme.
4. The indictment further alleges that Torlak and his co-conspirators explicitly discussed the need to conceal their conduct from the U.S. Government and its agencies, including OFAC, as well as commercial maritime entities.
In 2020, the United States conducted law enforcement operations that resulted in the seizure of four Iranian tankers that were en route to Venezuela, directly violating U.S. sanctions. According to the DOJ, the operation resulted in the seizure of 1.116 million barrels of fuel; the largest seizure of Iranian fuel ever made.
There are literally hundreds of shady black market companies around the world involved in the highly profitable black market oil business. But this appears to be the first known case in which an individual is being investigated with a direct nexus to the U.S.
This is a highly successful law enforcement operation for the United States, demonstrating its ability to detect, identify, monitor, and process foreign black market oil operations and the first with a direct nexus to the U.S. It is also a major defeat for international black market oil operations, especially those related to Iran and Venezuela, which rely on illicit operations to receive much-needed U.S. dollars while disrupting their illicit supply chain.
Source:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/largest-us-seizure-iranian-fuel-four-tankers
Jesús Daniel Romero inherited the military vocation of his father, who was a pilot in the Venezuelan Air Force, and since 1984, when he joined the U.S. Navy, he rose through various positions to reach the rank of commander.
He enlisted in the Navy in 1984 and was designated a Naval Intelligence Officer. He was also an intelligence operations specialist in the army's civil service. He was a deckhand on a nuclear missile cruiser. He then had the opportunity to be a navigator and, after 8 years, became an officer.
He spent five years on that cruiser: “We chased Soviet fleets, operated in the waters of Cuba, in the Arctic, in the Mediterranean, in the Atlantic, in the Black Sea.”
Romero became an officer through the Navy's Enlisted Program, graduated with honors from Norfolk State University, and earned a bachelor's degree in Political Science. Thanks to his good academic performance, he was able to choose the intelligence path. He studied aviation and then entered the intelligence school. He was assigned to an A-6 Intruder squadron, a tactical bomber operating from the USS America aircraft carrier, aboard which he went to Bosnia, Iraq, and Sudan.
William Acosta is the founder and CEO of Equalizer Private Investigations & Security Services Inc. He has coordinated investigations related to international drug trafficking, money laundering, and homicides in the U.S. and other countries such as Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, England, and literally all of Latin America.
William has been a New York Police Investigator for 10 years, 2 years in the Department of Treasury, and 6 years in the U.S. Army with various international deployments on communications and intelligence issues.
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