Five years have passed since the criminal process that incriminated Emilio Lozoya Austin in the Odebrecht case. Then, the Attorney General’s Office summoned a dozen middle and senior managers of Petróleos Mexicanos and what were then called subsidiaries of the productive company of the Mexican State, to testify about the contracts awarded to the Brazilian company.
The investigations spanned a decade (2006-2016), but focused on the tenders called by the Mexican oil company and the National Hydrocarbons Council between 2014 and 2016. The public ministries focused on the office of the then general director of Pemex, but also to a dozen senior managers, including Leonardo Cornejo Serrano and José Aarón Marrufo Ruiz.
The officials who required the reconfiguration of the Tula and Salamanca refineries, totaling almost 150 million dollars, remained under investigation. Five years of litigation have passed and there is no sanction, except for the criminal proceedings against Lozoya.
The official responsible for reviewing and validating these contracts is José Samuel Sánchez Reyes, who was then in charge of the Legal Department of Contracts and Agreements. Before the judicial authority, he accepted having reviewed and authorized the contracts signed between Odebrecht and Pemex for which Emilio Lozoya Austin would have received bribes.
Last year —after 25 years of uninterrupted service in the legal area— Sánchez Reyes began the procedures for his early retirement, which will allow him to access his liquidation, without losing his seniority.
A stealthy withdrawal… until a few weeks ago it was made public that in the production company there are ongoing investigations into a mechanism of coercion and bribery that involves former officials of autonomous bodies, Pemex executives, lobbyists and representatives of contractor companies.
The contracts under review were assigned by Pemex Refinación and Comesa. Among the firms under scrutiny are Galtec, Avanzia and Iberdrola. The Pemex subsidiary dedicated to the exploration and production of hydrocarbons would currently be on the verge of bankruptcy, due to mismanagement. Sources within Pemex point to the former legal deputy director of Contracts and Agreements as one of those responsible.
Under scrutiny, the contracts PXR-OP-SILN-SPR-CPMAC-A-4 and DCPA-SO-SILN-SPR-GPAC-A-4, both from 2014, but also others from 2016.
In those years, the fulfillment of the main promise of the peñista energy reform —the extraction of hydrocarbons in the mature fields of the Gulf of Mexico— depended on the execution in time and form of the shared production contracts.
Round One, in 2016, awarded contracts to the consortium formed by E&P Hidrocarburos y Servicios and Hokchi Energy, for the drilling of four oil wells located in the Salina del Istmo Basin. Sapura Energy would be in charge of manufacturing and installing a central well platform and a satellite platform that would connect to the processing facility in Paraíso, Tabasco.
The Malaysian firm was also contracted by ENI Mexico for the laying of pipelines —online and on land— in Maritime Block 1 in the Gulf of Mexico and the installation of the Mizton well platform, at water depths of approximately 40 meters.
In order to operate and meet these commitments, Sapura Energy subcontracted with SMEs from Campeche, Tabasco and Veracruz, from whom it requested credit for up to 90 days and offered to settle the debt, once it received payments from its customers, it will settle their debts. .
After two disastrous years — last year alone it racked up $2 billion in losses — Sapura Energy has had to take extreme measures. In Mexico, it promoted a commercial bankruptcy and declared a unilateral moratorium on payments, which affected some thirty companies, which demanded more than 600 million dollars. In the conciliation phase, the legal representatives of the creditors are waiting to be summoned by the Federal Institute of Commercial Bankruptcy Specialists.
