Orlen's Disastrous Venezuelan Oil Deal and Crypto Trail Lead to Criminal Charges
Polish energy giant Orlen lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a failed Venezuelan oil deal involving Dubai intermediaries and USDT crypto payments, sparking a criminal investigation.
It started like an aggressive commodities trade, the kind capable of generating tens of millions of dollars in profit within months. In late 2023, when the United States temporarily eased some sanctions on Venezuela's oil industry, Polish energy giant Orlen spotted an opportunity. Venezuelan crude was relatively cheap, the country was desperately in need of buyers, and Poland itself was in the midst of an effort to distance itself from Russian energy dependence following the invasion of Ukraine. However, the deal that was supposed to turn Orlen into a sophisticated global player ended in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, a criminal investigation, extradition requests, and a money trail that passed through companies in Dubai, intermediaries in Venezuela, and cryptocurrencies.
Orlen Trading Switzerland, the Swiss trading arm of the Polish energy group, entered into a deal to purchase about 6 million barrels of Venezuelan oil worth approximately $345 million. At the heart of the transaction was Hannon International, a Dubai-based trading company managed by a trader named Kam Ho Alex Tse. As part of the deal, Orlen transferred about $230 million in advance payments, but most of the oil it paid for never arrived. This is where the story becomes much more unusual than a typical failed oil transaction. Years of US sanctions against Nicolas Maduro's government made the payment system of the Venezuelan oil industry particularly complicated. Western banks shied away from deals related to PDVSA, Venezuela's state-owned oil company, and consequently, some oil deals began to be executed using USDT, Tether's stablecoin, whose price is pegged to the dollar.
Unlike a regular bank transfer, USDT can move between digital wallets across blockchain networks without the need for an American banking system to execute the transfer itself. For Venezuela, this was a way to bypass some of the barriers created by sanctions. For oil traders, it was a way to conduct transactions in a market where traditional payment channels were limited. But this advantage came with a price. Additional layers of intermediaries, less transparency, and a much greater difficulty in understanding who holds the money at each stage of the transaction. Some of the funds passed through a chain of entities and intermediaries that were supposed to turn the money into USDT and transfer it to parties capable of securing oil allocations from PDVSA. Large crypto sums were transferred during the process, with some transactions even carried out using physical storage media and transfers between parties in Caracas, yet the oil did not arrive as planned.
Tankers chartered to collect the cargo were left waiting off the coast of Venezuela, generating demurrage costs, fines, and significant payments that accumulate when a tanker remains beyond its allocated time at a port or loading area. Ultimately, out of the transactions made through Hannon, only about 500,000 barrels of fuel oil worth about $28.8 million were received—a small fraction of the funds transferred. Already in 2024, Polish authorities investigated approximately $330 million in payments made by Orlen Trading Switzerland to two Dubai-based companies, Hannon International and Horizon Global, as part of unfulfilled Venezuelan oil transactions. According to reports, PDVSA did not receive some of the funds required for the allocation of the cargoes, and the tankers were forced to leave without the oil for which they were sent, turning the affair from a business crisis into a criminal investigation.
In August 2026, the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw filed an indictment against three former executives at Orlen and Orlen Trading Switzerland. The prosecution claims that through three oil purchase contracts signed between August and December 2023, the companies suffered losses of about $378 million, or roughly 1.5 billion Polish zlotys. The maximum penalty for the charges could reach 25 years in prison. The prosecution is also pursuing a separate proceeding against Samer Awad, a former executive at Orlen Trading Switzerland, for whom Poland has requested extradition from the United Arab Emirates.
Orlen is no longer just a private oil company. It is one of the most important entities in the Polish economy and a group in which the state holds significant influence. Therefore, when hundreds of millions of dollars vanish in deals with relatively small companies in Dubai, the question is no longer just whether a trader took too much risk, but how the control system of one of Poland's flagship companies allowed such risk to accumulate in the first place. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk turned the affair into part of a broader review of how state-owned enterprises were managed during the previous government.
USDT was not the reason why the oil did not arrive for Orlen. The blockchain did not decide with whom the company would contract, who would receive the advances, or what collateral mechanism would be required from the intermediaries. Crypto was the infrastructure that allowed money to be transferred within a trading system that had already become opaque due to sanctions, and that is precisely why the case is interesting. Stablecoins like USDT are currently used far beyond trading Bitcoin or Ethereum. In countries where access to the dollar is limited, in places where the banking system is weak, and in markets subject to sanctions, they have sometimes become an alternative financial infrastructure.
Oil worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which previously would have required letters of credit, international banks, reconciliation systems, and clear payment routes, can now be connected to a network of digital wallets and intermediaries crossing borders within minutes. This can be a huge advantage, but it also changes the nature of risk. In the traditional banking system, a bank can halt a payment, demand documents, freeze a transaction, or enforce compliance mechanisms before the money moves. With USDT, once the tokens are sent to another wallet, there is no built-in mechanism to return them simply because the cargo did not arrive. Therefore, the risk is not necessarily in the technology itself, but in who holds the wallet on the other end.
