INCAUTAN PETROLEO TO VENEZUELA

        Despite alliance, Russian shipping company seizes Venezuelan crude in the Caribbean

SSAN EUSTAQUIO / HOUSTON (Reuters) - In October, the state oil company PDVSA sent an oil tanker to the Caribbean with the expectation that its cargo will raise about 20 million dollars, money that the country that is going through an acute economic crisis needs No delays to import scarce food and medicines.

But instead of unloading, the owners of the ship Aframax NS Columbus - which is part of the fleet of the Russian state conglomerate Sovcomflot - seized the oil claiming that PDVSA owed them 30 million dollars.

The close cooperation between Venezuela and Russia did not stop Sovcomflot from suing PDVSA in Sint Maarten, the Dutch part of a small island of San Martin in the northeastern end of the Caribbean Sea.

"The owners of the ships (...) imposed the embargo on the aforementioned oil cargo," reads the decision made in March by an island court. "They have claims for invoices not paid by PDVSA, related to the rental of their boats."

Five months after crossing the Caribbean, the tanker unloaded the crude in a storage terminal in San Eustaquio, an island south of Sint Maarten, famous for its colonial history, diving and wild goats.

But PDVSA, which struggles to pay its bills, also owes millions of dollars to several terminals in the Caribbean, including San Eustaquio, owned by the US firm NuStar Energy, according to a PDVSA executive and a source at one of the facilities.

The dispute with Sovcomflot, which is heard in the Admiralty Court of the United Kingdom, highlights how shipping companies are becoming increasingly aggressive in collecting debts from PDVSA.

It also shows that political allies like Russia are running out of patience with Venezuela's unpaid bills, whose obsolete and indebted tankers struggle to export oil and supply the domestic market.

NuStar and a law firm representing the subsidiaries of Sovcomflot declined to comment. PDVSA also did not respond to a request for information from Reuters.

PDVSA had always been a coveted business partner for shipping companies and oil service companies, but in recent years, as the country's economic crisis deepened, it earned the reputation of a troubled customer who often does not pay for it. what should

Its entangled debt network expands around the world, from repairs in shipyards in Portugal and invoices for construction of half-finished ships in Iran and Brazil, to a shipment of crude seized in the small San Eustaquio, whose strategic location in the Caribbean It turned it into a commercial port in the 18th century.

DEBTS WITH RUSSIA

Traditionally, Russia has supported President Nicolás Maduro through oil agreements and investments. State-owned Rosneft has lent money to PDVSA since 2016 and last month was in negotiations to help PDVSA meet bond payments.

But the problems have escalated in recent months between PDVSA and Sovcomflot, which provides about 15 percent of the ships used by the Venezuelan state to send crude to its customers amid the constant deterioration of its own fleet.

Until last year, the debts of PDVSA with Sovcomflot grew enough for executives of the Russian company to complain personally with the president of the Venezuelan state, Eulogio Del Pino, in the Russian city of Sochi, according to a department source. of Commerce of PDVSA.

Del Pino accepted a payment plan proposed by its executives and with the approval of Sovcomflot, the source said.

But PDVSA, engaged in millionaire payments of bonds and debts with service providers, could not cancel enough to avoid the Sovcomflot maneuver.

A representative of PDVSA denied that Del Pino was confronted by Sovcomflot in Sochi and said that the story is false, unprocessed.

In a similar case in September, a vessel owned by PDVSA was detained in Curaçao under a court order requested by the service company Core Laboratories for the accumulation of outstanding debts.

PDVSA's oil cargo holdings are relatively unusual, because creditors rarely have sufficiently detailed information about the movements of their fleet to obtain timely court orders.

Venezuela also tends to ensure that shipments leaving its ports legally belong to customers and not to PDVSA, which means that they are rarely able to be seized. The controversy with Sovcomflot was different because the creditors are the owners of the tanker. Although the crude on board the NS Columbus had already been sold to the Norwegian Statoil, the cargo was being transported in a tanker that sailed with a shipping document in the name of PDVSA, according to industry sources.

Statoil did not respond to a request for comment.