Venezuelan tycoon Wilmer Ruperti has succeeded in bringing in an emergency fuel cargo to help the country through a petrol shortage.
Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that a Greek tanker has docked at the El Palito refinery with 150,000 barrels of gasoline.
The cargo was bought by Ruperti's Maroil Trading, they said. Ruperti is not commenting.
The fuel will only partly alleviate the shortage in the country, where domestic refining has almost completely collapsed, while US sanctions against the regime of president Nicolas Maduro have made imports more difficult.
The tanker is believed to have loaded the cargo in Trinidad and Tobago.
Second cargo?
A similar move was reported earlier this month.
Maroil Trading had billed state-owned oil company PDVSA last month for €12m ($13m) for the purchase of up to 250,000 barrels of 95-octane petrol, according to an invoice seen by AP.
The oil was thought to have been sourced from an undisclosed Middle Eastern country and was due within days.
Venezuela has said it is formulating a “special fuel supply plan” to restore stockpiles in the “shortest possible time”.
Ruperti, a former tanker captain, has a track record of helping out the government at cricial times.
In 2002, the 60-year-old chartered Russian tankers to import petrol during a strike at PDVSA.
But these deals resulted in a fraud judgment against him in the UK in 2012, after Sovcomflot's Novoship subsidiary brought legal action.
Ruperti's Suramericana de Transportes de Petroleo owns a fleet of tankers and other vessels.
Novoship won a $59.2m High Court judgment against Ruperti in 2012, but struck a deal the next year that reduced the amount to $40m. As part of that agreement, Ruperti agreed to testify against private Russian shipowner Yuri Nikitin and former Novoship general manager Vladimir Mikhaylyuk in Novoship's fraud case against them.
