Of course you won't read about this in the Panamanian press, but Corruption Transparency International did not just publish a fake report, authored by a military coup plotter, about the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA, but they continue to defend and distribute knowingly false information, reveals Calvin Tucker:

Another week passed, and still no answers from TI. I tried their regional office for the Americas . An official told me that they “stand by their report”. Even though it’s wrong? “That’s your opinion,” she replied.

“But the information that you say doesn’t exist, does exist.”

“Talk to our press office,” she advised.

Despite having a strong sense of déjà vu, I phoned the press office and spoke once again with Gypsy Kaiser. She was positively seething. “Calling our staff is inappropriate behaviour,” she barked at me, like an angry school teacher. “But you won’t answer my questions,” I protested. “We will,” she responded.

“But when? I’ve already waited three weeks. ”

“I’m not giving you a date. Let’s just say it will be sooner rather than later.”

A week on and I’m still waiting. Obviously her definition of “sooner” is my definition of “later”.

In the meantime, TI are busy mailing their inaccurate report on Venezuela to businesses, NGOs and governments all over the world. No investigation has been held into what went wrong. And their Venezuela bureau continues to be run by a person who backed the 2002 coup against democracy.

Not a word either from Panama's chief "transparency" Angelica Maytín either, of course. Nor from her boss, I. Roberto Eisenmann.

Transparency International, remember them? The Panamanian chapter is headed by Angelica Maytín who once refused to answer questions about Panama Canal Authority (ACP) corruption because she was suffering from a conflict of interest as she also sat on some government board, then she promised to deal with that ACP issue later which she never did and then she got so angry that she wrote some prolactin driven piece in La Prensa saying it was all this author's fault, and let's not forget that Maytín is just a puppet of Bobby Eisenmann, the Chavez bashing whining oligarch with a money laundering past.

These people.

Talking about Chavez, Transparency International, true to form, is doing it again. Blatant fraud. They deliberately and purposefully published a report about transparency of oil companies which has EACH AND EVERY fact demonstrably wrong about the Venezuelan state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA. Full story with proof and evidence here.

Or maybe they got their data from one of those State Department magic laptops?

UPDATE: The Guardian has picked up the story, and it turns out the chief of Transparency International in Caracas is a military coup plotter:

"... on the night of April 12 - after Carmona suspended the assembly - Mercedes de Freitas, a director of the Fundacion Momento de la Gente, a legislative monitoring project subsidized by NED [National Endowment for Democracy, a US government agency], emailed the endowment defending the military and Carmona, claiming the takeover was not a military coup."