Obama Helps Soros Drill for Oil in Brazil
By RIGZONE
Sweetness-Light.com
U.S. Ready to Finance Oil Drilling in Brazil
EFE News Services 8/5/2009
The U.S. government is prepared to provide up to $10 billion in loans to finance the development of massive hydrocarbon reserves off Brazil’s coast, a Brazilian official said Wednesday.
President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, discussed the matter with officials this week during a visit to the South American country, Brazilian Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo da Silva told reporters.
He said the U.S. Export-Import Bank already has signed a letter of intent in that regard with Brazilian state oil company Petrobras.
The loan is equal in value to a similar credit line agreed to with the China Development Bank, also for exploiting Brazil’s "pre-salt" area, so-named because the estimated 80 billion barrels of high-quality crude in that new oil frontier lie far beneath the ocean floor under layers of rock and an unstable salt formation.
Under the agreement with the Chinese state bank, finalized during Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s visit to Beijing in May, Brazil can repay the loan facility with oil as opposed to cash…
Somehow this is finally making it into the news. But it has been going on for some time.
What is amazing is how our watchdog media neglected to mention any possible motive for Mr. Obama’s surprising double standard.
But we think we have a clue.
From something we posted almost exactly one year ago, from Bloomberg:
Soros hedge fund invests $811m to buy Petrobras stake
August 15, 2008
London: Billionaire investor George Soros bought an $811 million stake in Petroleo Brasileiro (Petrobras) in the second quarter, making the Brazilian state-controlled oil company his investment fund’s largest holding.
As of June 30, the stake in Petrobras, as the Rio de Janeiro-based oil producer is known, made up 22 per cent of the $3.68 billion of stocks and American depositary receipts held by Soros Fund Management, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Petrobras has since slumped 28 per cent…
In November, Petrobras announced the discovery of Tupi, a field with as much as 8 billion barrels of reserves, making it the largest find in the Americas since 1976.
“Petrobras has something that other oil companies don’t have: oil – lots of it and they’re going to find more,” said Ricardo Kob-ayashi, equity fund manager with UBS Pactual in Rio de Janeiro…
Tupi is part of a new deepwater offshore region known as the pre-salt that may contain as much as 50 billion barrels, according to Peter Wells, oil analyst with the UK’s Neftex Petroleum Consultants.
The drop in Petrobras’ US-traded common shares since June 30 would have reduced the value of Soros’s disclosed stake by $235 million.
Soros Fund Management didn’t report holding any Petrobras shares at the end of the first quarter. It did disclose much smaller stakes in the Brazilian oil company during 2007, including 150,000 depositary shares, with a market value of about $17.3 million at December 31.
The hedge fund company also had calls on another 35,000 shares at December 31…
We certainly have learned that Mr. Obama is good at rewarding those who put him into office.