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http://counterpunch.com/ross11182009.html


The Case of the Purloined Petroleum


In a catchy photo op staged this past August, officials of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are pictured handing over a four foot-long government check for $2.4 million USD to Mexican finance ministry officials as recompense for shipments of stolen Mexican oil smuggled into Texas right under the noses of U.S. customs enforcement officers and sold to Trammo Petroleum, a Houston transnational with branch offices in China, Brazil, Egypt, France, the U.K., and Switzerland.

Part of the shipment of purloined petroleum was then sold off to a German BASF subsidiary in Port Arthur for $2.4 million. According to the New York Times, the deal was brokered by one Josh Crescenzi, Rio Grande Valley supervisor for Continental Fuels and a bundler for former Texas oilman George Bush during his 2004 election campaign who is now in a federal protected witness program. Trammo CEO Donald Schroeder has pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property and will be sentenced in December.

The Texas case is, in fact, the tip of a sinkhole that involves tens of millions of barrels of stolen Mexican oil worth billions of greenback dollar bills, U.S. customs enforcement, corrupt oil union officials, dozens of mysteriously "disappeared" oil workers, and a dread drug cartel.

Mexican authorities calculate that more than 2,000,000 barrels are stolen from PEMEX, the national petroleum monopoly, each year by workers, company insiders, and organized crime. A 2007 New York Times investigation estimated that a billion dollars worth of Mexican oil was being siphoned from PEMEX annually through fraud, theft, and clandestine "tomas" ("takes") drilled into company pipelines. Thousands of gallons of jet fuel allegedly wound up in the tanks of drug cartel jets carrying cocaine in from Colombia for transshipment to the U.S.

PEMEX numbers (questionable at best) reveal that more than 1.5 million barrels were sucked out of the oil giant's pipelines in the first nine months of 2009 alone. A Mexican government investigation into one network of oil thieves operating in the Burgos sector along the border in Coahuila and neighboring Nuevo Leon states yielded 740,000 pesos in cold, hard cash and evidence of $46,000,000 USD in stolen oil sales, presumably to U.S. buyers.

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[Cirque du So-What]

1. K&R

Wherever you have oil, you'll find corruption, drugs, murder & Bushes.