16 April 2014, News Wires – Oil services provider Evya is the second Mexican company implicated for having fraudulent loans linked to Citigroup, according to a spokesperson at state-owned Pemex.
Citigroup found a second case of fraud at its Mexico unit, this one for less than $30 million, chief financial officer John Gerspach said on a conference call after the bank reported first-quarter earnings on Monday.
Ciudad del Carmen-based Evya is the company implicated by Gerspach, according to the spokesperson at Pemex, who asked not to be named because of company policy, Bloomberg reported.
In February, New York-based Citigroup cut its previously reported 2013 earnings for the fourth quarter after finding fraud related to about $585 million in loans made to Mexico-based oil-services company Oceanografia. Citigroup found issues beyond Oceanografia, John McDonald, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein & Company, said in a report last month.
“The issues we found to date involve that one program and these two suppliers,” Gerspach said. “There are obviously issues with how that program was being executed.”
Requests from Bloomberg seeking comment from Evya, which designs oil-platform heliports, weren’t immediately returned.
Oceanografia, which was seized by the government in February, is now being run by the Finance Ministry’s Asset Transfer and Administration Service, known as SAE, and was approved for bankruptcy protection today by a Mexico City judge.
– Upstream
