Orlen's $230 Million Venezuela Oil Deal Turns into Digital Nightmare

A multinational energy company, Orlen, suffered a massive financial loss of at least $230 million due to a failed oil deal in Venezuela.

The deal involved buying six million barrels of crude oil from the state-owned PDVSA with USDT (Tether), a widely used stablecoin. However, the process quickly went awry as intermediaries and uncooperative brokers got entangled in an opaque network.

The Orlen Trading Switzerland, the company's Swiss trading arm, paid $230 million to a Dubai-based intermediary in 2023 December. The money was supposed to be converted into USDT and then sent to Venezuela. However, it appears that this digital payment system became convoluted as various brokers and middlemen were involved.

By January 2024, it was revealed that $110 million of the transferred funds had been handed over physically in Caracas on memory sticks. But the promised oil shipment failed to materialize.