Another Former PEMEX Director General Headed to Jail?

A federal judge has ordered the arrest of Carlos Treviño, PEMEX Director General from Nov. 27 2017 to Dec. 1st 2018 and the direct predecessor of current PEMEX Director General Octavio Romero.

According to a report by Reforma, the arrest order followed Treviño’s failure to show up at a court hearing back in Sep. 7 regarding accusations of criminal conspiracy and money laundering made against him. As MBN reported in August, Treviño was named in a list of co-conspirators by both fellow ex-leader of the NOC and former PAN Senator Jorge Luis Lavalle. This list also included names of other senators and governors, along with major national political figures such as former SHCP head Luis Videgaray, former presidential candidates Jose Antonio Meade and Ricardo Anaya and the third and only remaining former PEMEX Director General to have worked under former President Enrique Peña Nieto, José Antonio González Anaya (the list also included the name of Peña Nieto himself).  

While FGR prosecutors stated at the time that pursuing investigations against everyone on the list was impractical and unworkable, they did settle on investigating Treviño by the end of August. Prosecutors focused particularly on Lozoya’s accusation that Treviño received bribes in exchange for contracts between PEMEX and Braskem, a subsidiary of Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht and one half of Braskem Idesa, operators of the Etileno XXI petrochemical complex which received negative attention from the current government before renegotiating its natural gas supply contract with the NOC. This led to the subpoena of Treviño to the aforementioned Sep. 7 hearing that he failed to honor. In an interview at the time, Treviño claimed that he had never even met Lozoya and that these accusations were merely an attempt from Lozoya to “smear whoever he could so he could save himself.”

It is not clear why the arrest order came at this moment, considering that Treviño’s fault was almost two months ago. Treviño’s lawyer Óscar Zamudio has already spoken to the public to make clear that his client is only guilty of “failing to follow the whim of a judge” by not showing up to the hearing and that the arrest order was publicized in the media but never formally communicated to him. Furthermore, Zamudio also claims that Treviño is currently in Texas and thus outside of the arrest order’s jurisdiction.