Saudi Aramco’s Dealings with Dodgy Competitor

1.5 billion dollars of suspicious transactions

The banking documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and shared with ICIJ, ARIJ and other media partners, now being reported as the FinCEN Files, reveal mysterious bank transfers sent from Brazil’s Petrobras to Saudi Aramco at the height of the Brazilian company’s biggest corruption scandal.

At the height of the car wash scandal, considered one of the biggest corruption scandals in history and which implicated the Brazilian government-owned Petrobras in 2014, the giant oil company sent large sums of money to the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco, in a process flagged as suspicious by Deutsche Bank.

It was not the scandal of corruption, bribery and money-laundering of Petrobras alone that shocked Brazil’s economy and its political systems, as between mid-2014 and early 2016, the global economy also faced one of the biggest declines in oil prices since WW2, reaching 70%.

In the same period, specifically between September 2014 and October 2016, Petrobras sent 29 payments totalling $1.5 billion to Saudi Aramco over four different time periods, with one set of transactions reaching around $600 million, according to bank documents.

The data obtained by BuzzFeed News and shared with ICIJ, ARIJ and other media partners, indicates a set of suspicious transactions between the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras and the Saudi oil company Aramco from 2014-2016.

These transactions, contained in suspicious activity reports or SARs, were filed by Deutsche Bank with the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

SARs are not evidence of wrongdoing. They reflect views by watchdogs within banks, known as compliance officers, reporting transactions that bore signs that deserve further scrutiny.