A former employee of the world’s largest oil trader, Vitola, will go on trial in the United States this week accused of bribing Ecuadorian officials to win a $300 million contract from Ecuador’s state-owned Petroecuador.

Jury selection is scheduled for Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn, with opening statements scheduled for Wednesday. This was reported by an international news agency Reuters.

But who is the former Vitol employee involved in the bribery scheme in Petroecuador? This is Javier Aguilar, a Mexican resident of the United States, who has been formally indicted on two charges: conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and conspiracy to launder money.

The information is known as part of a wide-ranging investigation being carried out in the United States that includes Nilsen Arias, a former Correismo strongman – who was Petroecuador’s director of international trade and who executed contracts for the sale of long-term crude oil with Petrochina, Unipec and Petrothailand – and others high-ranking officials of the state-owned company, as well as state secretaries of the government of Rafael Correa and private companies that had dealings with Petroecuador, and even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of that country.

U.S. federal prosecutors say Aguilar, who worked in Houston as a representative for an energy trading company, paid nearly $1 million in bribes in 2016 to Nilsen Arias, who was Petroecuador’s international trade manager at the time, and an unnamed Energy Department official to help the Middle East state the company received a 30-month contract for the Ecuadorian fuel oil market. However, it is known that Arias would have received more than $17 million in bribes, shared with Petroecuador officials.

Aguilar was instrumental in similar practices in several Latin American countries, a scandal that rocked energy markets from Mexico to Brazil.

Vitol had an agreement to buy fuel oil from a Middle Eastern company and then market it, prosecutors said. That company is not listed in court documents, but Reuters previously reported that it was Oman Trading International, which was renamed OQ Trading and fully integrated into Oman’s state oil company OQ.

According to U.S. prosecutors, Aguilar ordered Vitol to transfer money to shell companies controlled by his associates, which then sent the funds to the accounts of Arias and another official. Aguilar had Vitol enter into “sham” agreements with shell companies to make the transactions appear legitimate, prosecutors said.

As part of the investigation on Ecuador, which was submitted to the Ecuadorian prosecutor’s office in October 2022, it was stated that Arias participated, along with other officials, “in an international scheme of bribery and money laundering”, in which he “accepted and “agreed to receive bribes ” by energy and asphalt marketing companies, using his official position to help the companies obtain and retain business associated with Petroecuador and thereby gain an undue advantage.

The report also says that during his tenure in Petroecuador, the accused Nilsen Arias Sandoval participated in the negotiation, management and supervision of a series of direct contracts between Petroecuador and government entities of other countries that made loans to Petroecuador guaranteed by oil. Since the contracting parties in these direct contracts were foreign governments, Petroecuador did not require a competitive bidding process to award the contract.

To further the bribery scheme and conceal the proceeds, defendant Nilsen Arias and his co-conspirators, including middlemen, caused electronic transfers of bribe payments to domestic and offshore accounts denominated in dollars and euros. Many of these electronic transfers were processed through correspondent banks in the United States.

The news about the American investigation stirred up social networks, where several media outlets and users recalled the corruption conspiracy involving Arias, who had already pleaded guilty and agreed to forfeit $13 million in bribes. Correa, who is a fugitive from Ecuadorian justice, reacted with a tweet in which he stated that “from a corrupt person like Nilsen Arias, they made up a whole narrative to blacken everyone. His “calculations” are ridiculous and they are ones that the extortionist from Villavicenci has already made. “We won’t even waste time responding to such a disgrace.”

Fernando Villavicencio, who was killed by assassins in August 2023, revealed the millions of losses caused by oil contracts with Asian companies and the role that Arias played in the implementation of these contracts that were harmful to the country.

Before the Oversight Commission, at the end of 2022, the former manager of Petroecuador and former Minister of Energy Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli confirmed that he had sent a communication to President Rafael Correa condemning the corruption that existed in Petroecuador, but that the president at the time had taken no action. in that case. The problems reached the Prosecutor’s Office, but they were initiated by the then prosecutor Galo Čiriboga.

Meanwhile, a report by the Oversight Commission, then chaired by Villavicencio, found that Ecuador lost $4.7 billion because it supplied oil at below-market prices.

Villavicencio mentioned that together with a group of representatives, he will request that the prosecutor Diana Salazar initiate criminal proceedings against Nilsen Arias, Jorge Glas Espinel, Rafael Correa and all those connected to the corruption conspiracy with Petrochino, and that through international assistance he will demand the Arias version.