How a Brazen Plot to Rig Oil Auctions Cost Venezuela Billions

David Boies had turned 76 and was contemplating retirement when he received a call from an old friend, an investor named Bill Duker, about a potentially lucrative opportunity. Duker had recently agreed to finance an audacious lawsuit, and he wanted Boies, perhaps the highest-profile attorney in the US, to join. Duker told Boies he’d received evidence that the auctions Venezuela uses to sell its oil had been systematically rigged for a decade or more, depriving the economically beleaguered country of billions of dollars. Among the scheme’s beneficiaries, Duker said, were Glencore, Trafigura and Vitol, the three biggest commodity trading houses in the world, with combined annual revenue of a trillion dollars. Duker and his associates planned to sue them, in what would be one of America’s largest private civil actions.

Central to the case, Duker explained, was an old laptop once owned by the conspiracy’s alleged mastermind, Francisco “Squito” Morillo, a scrappy Venezuelan who’d implanted himself as a kind of unofficial intermediary between the state oil company and some of its key customers. The laptop contained a trove of explosive material, including instant message chats discussing confidential information and account statements for offshore companies that had made large, unexplained payments to family members of Venezuelan oil executives. It had reached Duker via Morillo’s bitter rival, Wilmer Ruperti, a medallion-sporting, cigar-puffing Venezuelan tycoon who’d obtained it from Morillo’s ex-wife.