Venezuela Oil Industry Lost Billions in Bid-Rigging Scandal - Bloomberg

From left: Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Francisco Henrique Morillo, Vanessa Acosta Friedman, David Boies and Wilmer Ruperti. Illustration: Nicole Rifkin for Bloomberg Businessweek America’s best-known lawyer, a couple of fraudsters and a pariah government joined forces to sue the world’s largest commodities trading firms. The evidence is explosive, but the bungled lawsuit has so far come to nothing. Liam Vaughan and Lucia Kassai 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 s

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