Hundreds of millions of dollars advanced, supertankers waiting off Venezuela, cryptocurrency moving through intermediaries — and almost none of the promised oil arriving.
The deal began in late 2023, during a six-month period in which Washington temporarily eased sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry. Orlen Trading Switzerland (OTS), the Swiss trading arm created to expand Orlen’s international trading operations, agreed to buy about six million barrels of Venezuela’s heavy Merey crude. The contract was worth $345 million.
But buying Venezuelan oil was highly unconventional. Years of US sanctions had pushed state oil company PDVSA and its trading ecosystem toward alternative payment channels. According to a Financial Times investigation published this week, Hannon converted and moved substantial sums through USDT, the dollar-linked stablecoin issued by Tether, while trying to secure the promised cargoes.
“OTS advanced around $230 million to Dubai-based Hannon International.”
EuroAsia.News, reporting from London
By December 2023, Orlen-chartered supertankers were positioned near Venezuela’s José oil terminal. They were supposed to load millions of barrels. Instead, they waited.
Weeks became months. Loading dates slipped repeatedly. Hannon blamed PDVSA repricing and competition from larger buyers as traders rushed to exploit the temporary sanctions window. In January, Hannon representatives travelled to Caracas themselves. The FT reported that access to tens of millions of dollars in USDT was carried on USB devices and transferred through a succession of local brokers who claimed they could obtain oil.
The crude still did not arrive.
A separate attempt produced only around 500,000 barrels of fuel oil — roughly half of one expected cargo — but the original six-million-barrel Merey deal remained unfulfilled. By March 2024 the situation had become financially brutal. Orlen’s internal estimate put shipping and demurrage costs connected with the Hannon transactions at about $72 million.
On March 28, 2024, OTS terminated the original contract. Reuters later reported that several Orlen-chartered tankers left Venezuelan waters empty as loading delays and the approaching return of US sanctions disrupted exports. Across wider Venezuelan transactions, Reuters reported that Polish investigators were tracing about $330 million paid by OTS to Dubai-based intermediaries for oil that was not delivered.
The dispute is now about far more than missing cargoes. Hannon says it acted as a “sleeve”, using cryptocurrency because OTS could not make such payments directly. Orlen’s current management disputes that interpretation, saying Hannon’s contractual obligation was simply to deliver the oil and that third-party arrangements did not reduce that responsibility. Arbitration continues.
Warsaw prosecutors have charged former OTS executives with criminal mismanagement connected with the trading operation. The allegations have not been tested at trial, and the accused deny wrongdoing.
The affair matters beyond Poland. It shows how sanctions can create parallel commodity markets where conventional banks, established traders and standard payment controls are replaced by little-known intermediaries, digital wallets and informal networks. Crypto did not cause the failed oil trade, but it allowed enormous sums to move through a chain that was far harder to verify than a conventional bank-to-bank transaction.
There is one final irony.
After Orlen cancelled the Hannon contract, one of the vessels previously chartered for the operation eventually loaded Venezuelan heavy crude at José in April 2024. The cargo was not for Poland. It was bound for Reliance Industries’ refinery in Gujarat, India.
The oil existed. Poland had simply failed to secure it.
