By Carlos Camacho in Caracas.
The United States is offering a $15 million bounty on information that helps it “interrupt” Iranian oil shipments to the Nicolas Maduro regime. The US argues that cooperation violates sanctions the US has imposed on both the Tehran and Caracas regimes.
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“The transporting of oil to Venezuela violates the United States and international sanctions…supporting the global terrorism activities of Iran,” read such a posting by the United States Department of State’s Rewards for Justice program in Spanish to Instagram.
“The Rewards for Justice Program of the United States Department of State offers a $15 million reward for information that interrupts other financial mechanisms of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” a Tehran organization that has been designated as terrorist by the State.
And while the Maduro regime celebrates the arrival of every shipment of Iranian gasoline with parades and televised speeches, this time around secrecy, is surrounding the latest such shipment, with no official information about it from the regime.
The IRGC reads the caption complementing the post, “is selling oil to Venezuela for its terrorist activities. RPJ offers a reward of up to $15 million for info on this (IRGC) financial mechanism.”
The appeal was posted Tuesday in various social media accounts of the US government, including a Spanish-language posting on the Instagram account of the US Embassy in Venezuela, which is now operating out of Bogota.
The reward offer comes just as Tanker Trackers and other web-based vessel-tracking services report that two Iranian vessels are offloading a cargo of gasoline in Venezuelan ports, part of a new cooperation scheme that began nine months ago. Venezuela became the first country in the history of the Western Hemisphere to receive oil from Iran. With its six in-country refineries in disrepair, Venezuela has been unable to produce gasoline for a year now, even if it owns the largest oil deposits known to man.
