UpdatedThe Isla oil refinery on lease to PDVSA for decades now may be no more...
Our contact in the Dutch Antilles tells us people in Curaçao think Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA may be forced to transfer its rights for the oil refinery Isla, which it had been leasing for decades now. They say PDVSA has no money for the costly maintenance of the refinery, a refinery that has been an ecological issue for many years now. PDVSA would be looking for groups to transfer the lease and other resources there. I also got a link to a Dutch article. The article confirms, among other things, that the civic group Movementu Solushon Isla (MSI) suspects PDVSA needs to get rid of that Isla Refinery soon.
The family company Arevenca has apparently proposed to buy the Curacao refinery for 800 million dollars and invest $2.5 billion in the construction of a new one at Bullenbaai. PDVSA - the MSI group says - could be tempted to accept the offer. Many people in Curaçao would not feel happy about that either because the new refinery would mean 400 hectares of better land would be occupied and the environmental problem would simply move there.
What this tells us regarding Venezuela is PDVSA could be having more and more trouble handling things on its own.
Independently from this I wonder about this Arevenca company, a company I never heard about before: how come Arevenca says- or at least the Curacao people who claim to report that- it has so much money for such a deal? I suppose they don't. So: what are the Arevenca people really up to? Their site is really bad for the standards of a little shop, but it is just inconceivable for a multimillion dollar company. And yet they claim to be a multinational company (I suppose because they are Venezuelans and go to the Dutch islands). Are the people in Curacao just naif to believe these guys could take the refinery over or do they just want to spread those news?