The New PDVSA makes an embarrassing international debut
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic NewsPosted: Friday, May 09, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel
VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: The Offshore Technology Conference is held every year and brings together hundreds of technicians, managers and executives of petroleum producing, service and consultancy companies from all over the world. This year the OTC was held in Houston, Texas ... the event chosen by Ali Rodriguez, the current president of PDVSA, to promote the "new" company to the international petroleum community.
To this effect he ordered the preparation of a presentation on PDVSA's plans and opportunities for foreign investment in the Venezuelan petroleum sector. The objective was to generate enough interest to attract up to $20 billion in new private investments for the next five years or so.
Off they went to Houston ... a group of some 75 persons led by Rodriguez who, as president with his immediate collaborators traveled in private jets, with the lesser mortals in commercial airline, taking advantage of a special fare of about $500 round trip per person.
Half of the group checked into the Hotel Saint Regis, $320 per person, and the other half into the Houstonian Hotel, $270 per night or so.
Meeting rooms were arranged for several events: A Monday morning breakfast, the presentation, a luncheon with Venezuelan students and a press conference, at a cost of some $60,000. The staff made preparations for the limousines, cocktails, documents to be distributed and the Mont Blanc fountain pens to be given as gifts to senior managers of important companies, duly engraved with their names. All in all the costs involved were of the order of some $600,000.
This would not be an inordinately high amount if the objectives of the trip were fulfilled. But this was not to be the case but, according to independent reports which I have received from four people in attendance, the event took off on the wrong foot for Rodriguez, when the "Houston Chronicle" published an op-piece by two University of Houston professors in which a very unfavorable evaluation of the technical level of the PDVSA delegation was given.
This was followed by poor reception given by the audience to the PDVSA presentation Monday, May 5. The reasons were the low quality of the presentation and the exaggerated political flavor of its contents ... while insufficient commercial and technical data were presented.
To make things worse, at the Wednesday lunch there was a presentation by Luis Vielma (former Director of PDVSA Exploration & Production and one of the dismissed managers). Rodriguez desperately tried to block the presentation without success, since Vielma has an impeccable reputation in petroleum circles. Vielma's presentation was in front of a full house and I would like to quote literally an email received from a US manager at a front-ranking consultancy firm:
Today, at lunch time I had the great fortune of witnessing a truly great performance by your fellow countryman Luis Vielma. His presentation at OTC was just absolutely superb; sensitive, informative, clear and truly professional. You would have been very, very proud ... I was there, as a friend and as a Society ... Board member. He received a standing ovation on more than one occasion ... the room was packed... It was clearly evident why he was a leader of the great PDVSA. Kind regards,
This was more than Rodriguez Araque could handle. According to analyst Alexandra Beech, mbeech@nyc.rr.com, he immediately pulled the entire PDVSA delegation out of the conference and cut their stay short ... he failed to appear in a meeting where he was supposed to talk about investment opportunities in Venezuela and left his Trinidadian counterpart on the panel to cover all bases ... he also failed to appear at the luncheon for Venezuelan students ... which was cancelled ... as well as the press conference, equally cancelled.
Such an abrupt retreat from this important conference places the "new" PDVSA in a very unfavorable light in the eyes of the international petroleum community. It is one more example of the mess the revolutionary managers at PDVSA have created.
This is why I insist that the mentioning of these embarrassing events is not what causes the discrediting of the company and of the country abroad ... the damage has been done by the incompetence and mediocrity of Ali Rodriguez Araque and his collaborators.
The successful presentation by Luis Vielma contributed to compensate for the disastrous performance of the "new" PDVSA and ... at least ... made it known to the audience that there are Venezuelans who can be professional and competent.
I hope it will be sometime before Ali Rodriguez dares to appear again in front of true oil managers.
Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983. In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort. You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com