A Turkish man has been arrested in Florida for allegedly violating US sanctions by conspiring to ship oil for Venezuela’s state-owned energy company, Agence France-Presse reported, citing officials on Monday.
Taşkın Torlak, 37, was arrested in Miami on Saturday while attempting to leave the United States for Turkey, they said.
“This defendant allegedly conspired to illegally sell Venezuelan oil, using deceit and trickery to hide the fact that this oil originated from Venezuela,” Matthew Graves, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a statement.
“Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, was sanctioned by the US government to prevent the current regime from further depleting the nation’s resources while it unlawfully remains in power,” Graves said.
According to the criminal complaint, Torlak and unnamed co-conspirators have been involved since at least November 2020 in a complex scheme to evade US sanctions and ship petroleum products from Venezuela and Iran.
“The scheme included obfuscating the identities of tankers moving the oil by re-naming and re-flagging vessels, covering vessel names with paint or blankets, and turning off the electronics that track vessels’ locations,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
According to the complaint, Torlak and his co-conspirators received tens of millions of dollars from PDVSA for transporting Venezuelan oil.
Torlak’s alleged co-conspirators were not identified by name in the complaint but were described as a Ukrainian national, an employee of a China-based shipping company and a tanker captain based in Turkey.
Torlak is the son of Ali Torlak, a former lawmaker from the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, according to Turkish media reports.