Mexico Looks The Other Way As Contractors Fleece Oil Giant Pemex
It isn't clear why Pemex sold the material so cheaply. By giving Unigel the generous discount, Pemex lost $24.2 million from 2009 to 2011, according to the SFP report. Unigel made just over $30 million on the deal, the report says.
Two Pemex Petrochemicals officials approved the problematic portion of the contract. The two officials, Lorenzo Aldeco and Manuel Sanchez, did so without the approval of the legal department or their fellow managers, bypassing routine safeguards, the SFP report found. Aldeco later left Pemex and went on to become an executive at Unigel. Sanchez now runs the Pemex Petrochemicals unit.
The internal investigators recommended that Pemex Petrochemicals renegotiate part of the contract. In a separate audit report last year, congressional auditors called on Pemex to sanction the employees who supervised the deal, without naming names.
Instead, Daniel Ramirez, then head of the SFP investigative unit at Pemex, sent a letter to his SFP colleagues stationed at Pemex Petrochemicals, directing them to defuse the problems with Unigel, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters.
"You should work with the director of Pemex Petrochemicals to attend to and answer these recommendations, with the aim of avoiding them becoming definitive issues," the letter says.
Sanchez, now the head of Pemex Petrochemicals, said there was nothing unusual about the letter. As for his role in greenlighting the Unigel deal, Sanchez said he signed off on an estimate of Unigel's planned investment, which didn't require legal review. The price of the contract wasn't renegotiated, in spite of the SFP report's recommendation, he said. Asked why, he compared his company's relationship with Unigel to a "marriage": "Not everything is perfect, perfect, perfect. We realized that there are things to improve."
Ramirez was named last month to the newly created position of general auditor for Pemex. He did not respond to requests for comment. Pemex's press office declined to comment. The investigation into the Unigel contract is ongoing, according to internal Pemex investigators.
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