Leadership

Global Investment Alliance

GIA is supported by experienced professionals with deep technical, operating, and strategic backgrounds focused on creating long-term value in Venezuela’s energy sector.

Our Leadership Team

Krishna Vathyam

Executive Chairman

Krishna Vathyam

Executive Chairman

Krishna Vathyam is the Executive Chairman of Global Investment Alliance (GIA), where he leads the company's strategy to acquire and develop oil and gas opportunities in Venezuela. He brings more than three decades of executive leadership in the global energy industry, having founded, financed, and grown multiple exploration and production companies from inception through public listing. As Cofounder, Director, and CEO of New Stratus Energy, he arranged crude marketing contracts and financing with industry leaders and oversaw the company's listing on the TSX Venture Exchange. Earlier, as Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Petrodorado Ltd., he took the company public within eight months of founding, raised more than US$120 million across multiple private and public financing rounds, and built a nine-asset exploration portfolio spanning Colombia, Peru, and Paraguay through acquisitions and joint ventures. This record of identifying opportunities, structuring financing, and executing growth is central to GIA's approach across its direct, minority non-operated, and carried-interest investment categories.

Mr. Vathyam's operational and technical expertise in Venezuela is grounded in nearly 22 years of progressively senior management roles at Schlumberger, including direct assignments in Venezuela alongside leadership positions across the United States, Latin America, and the Middle East, where he held profit-and-loss responsibility for business units generating more than US$500 million in annual revenue. He is recognized as a company-wide subject matter expert in petrophysics, reservoir engineering, and production, and has led the evaluation and commercial deployment of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies — including steam, in-situ combustion, and chemical EOR — for heavy and super-heavy oil reservoirs, technical disciplines directly applicable to Venezuela's Orinoco heavy-oil belt. He later applied this expertise as Technology Manager at Pacific Rubiales Energy Corp, directing frontier drilling, completions, and production technology programs and facilitating technology transfer across Latin American operations. This combination of field engineering grounding, technical authority in reservoir and production disciplines, and senior operational management in Venezuela and comparable heavy-oil, high-complexity environments underpins GIA's technical due diligence and asset evaluation capabilities.

At GIA, Mr. Vathyam leads a team spanning operations, geosciences, reservoir engineering, and production, together with the capital relationships needed to pursue direct asset ownership, minority non-operated partnerships, and carried-interest structures across Venezuela's oil and gas industry. He holds a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and is fluent in English, Hindi, Spanish, and Telugu — a linguistic and cultural range that supports GIA's relationships with government, industry, and financial stakeholders across the region.

Antonio Prince

Executive Director (Services and Business Continuity)

Antonio Prince

Executive Director (Services and Business Continuity)

Antonio Prince is Executive Director (Services and Business Continuity) and Co-Founder of GIA, bringing over 42 years of oil and gas leadership across Venezuela, Mexico, broader Latin America, North Africa, Middle East and Russia. In Venezuela, Antonio led project design and operations management for more than 10 complex drilling and workover campaigns, including HP/HT deep and shallow wells in the Eastern Basin, and high-volume well operations in the Western Basin (PRISA, Shell Lake Maracaibo Liaison with Schlumberger). He has served as senior LATAM and Global roles at Schlumberger. Antonio was a prime mover in Mexico’s E&P opening and has advised on capital transactions with Goldman Sachs PE, BlackRock, Macquarie, and Seale & Associates. He holds a Chemical Engineering degree from Universidad Simón Bolívar and is based in Mexico City.

Kent McDougall

Independent Director

Kent McDougall

Independent Director

Mr. McDougall is an energy marketing and infrastructure executive with over 40 years of leadership experience across energy sectors and capital markets. Currently serving as President and CEO of Buffalo Rail & Infrastructure Corp., he has a proven track record of driving corporate growth, executing commodities trading strategies, and managing heavy industrial logistics. His executive background is supported by extensive financial market experience, having previously served as Vice President of Energy Sales at Goldman Sachs and Director of Fixed Income, Energy Trading & Marketing at Credit Suisse. A seasoned corporate governor, Mr. McDougall also serves as an Independent Director for ROK Resources Inc. and Chief Commercial Officer for Torq Energy Logistics, bringing balanced financial and operational oversight to the GIA board.

Massimo Melandri

Chief Operating Officer

Massimo Melandri

Chief Operating Officer

Massimo Melandri brings more than two decades of upstream oil and gas leadership across Venezuela, Mexico, and the broader Americas to his role as COO of Global Investment Alliance, Inc. (GIA).

Massimo's direct operational experience in Venezuela began as District Manager and continued as Deputy General Manager and Board Director of PetroJunín/PetroBicentenario, a joint venture formed with PDVSA. In this front-line role, he served as the primary liaison to PDVSA under a joint-operatorship model, securing a $2 billion revolving credit facility for a heavy oil development, accelerating first production by nine months, delivering a 50-km export and diluent pipeline system in under a year, and cutting lost-time incident frequency by 45%.

As District Manager for the Dación Field in Venezuela, Massimo led the re-development and full operational management of the field under a Service Contract, overseeing a $200 million annual budget across 340 active wells producing 340,000 barrels of fluid per day and 62,000 barrels of oil per day. He drove production from 35,000 BOPD to a peak of 72,000 BOPD, cut operating costs by 15% in the first year through contract renegotiations and revised operating philosophies, and renegotiated oil delivery specifications to maximize the field's recovery factor.

He deepened his regional expertise as VP of Business Development for Eni's Houston-based Americas office, overseeing projects across Venezuela, Ecuador, and Trinidad & Tobago — including negotiation of the gas sales agreement for the Perla Project (approximately 8.7 TCF) and the construction contract for a 1 GW power plant tied to the PetroJunín development. He later served as VP of Upstream Negotiations & Equity Gas for the Americas and Central Asia, directing commercial strategy across a nine-country portfolio that included Venezuela, before advancing to VP of M&A Upstream, where he led due diligence and structuring for international transactions, including the acquisition of operatorship in Alaska's Oooguruk field.

Earlier in his career, Massimo built and led Eni Mexico as Managing Director and Board Director, standing up the company's local operations following Mexico's 2013 energy reform and winning exploration and production blocks across two bidding rounds.

Massimo holds an MBA in General Management from IESA (Venezuela), a degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering from Universidad Metropolitana (Venezuela), and has completed a Post-Graduate Program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at The University of Texas at Austin. He is fluent in English, Spanish, and Italian.

Jorge Almonacid

V.P. Production

Jorge Almonacid

V.P. Production

Jorge Daniel Almonacid Silva is a senior oil and gas executive and petroleum engineer with more than 40 years of experience across production operations, surface facilities, well services, field development, and technical advisory roles in Venezuela and Argentina. His career includes leadership positions with Eni Dación, Petrobras de Venezuela, Pérez Companc, and his own company, Caribbean Process and Treatment, C.A., where he has provided specialized services to Venezuela’s oil industry.

Throughout his career, Jorge has led and supported complex production operations involving crude oil, water, and gas treatment, well intervention and workover activities, surface facilities, production optimization, and the implementation of new technologies. He has also served as an advisor to several PDVSA joint ventures, providing technical guidance on production operations, surface facilities, and well-related activities.

His experience also includes responsibility for field production systems, export operations, process improvements, technical specifications, budgeting, and coordination with engineering teams and government entities. At Petrobras de Venezuela, he participated in multidisciplinary projects involving water treatment, heavy crude processing, gas management, and the evaluation of new production technologies.

Jorge holds a degree in Petroleum Engineering from Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco and has completed additional studies and professional training in management, finance, negotiation, environmental management, and heavy-oil production technologies.

Reinaldo Viloria

Geology & Statistic Modeling

Reinaldo Viloria

Geology & Statistic Modeling

Reinaldo Viloria is a Senior Reservoir Characterization Specialist and Global Subsurface Advisor with over 30 years of international experience leading 3D geostatistical modeling, quantitative reservoir characterization, and multidisciplinary data integration to de-risk high-capital E&P decisions. He holds an extensive international track record delivering high-impact projects across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, and Africa.

He has held C-suite and senior technical leadership roles—including Chief Operating Officer (COO), Operations Director, and Principal Advisor—at top-tier energy firms and consulting organizations such as iReservoir (USA), Earth Decision-Paradigm, OGO Mexico PDVSA-INTEVEP, and Nous Group.

A recognized authority in advanced geostatistics, probabilistic uncertainty quantification, and subsurface workflow automation, Reinaldo bridges deep mathematical rigor (B.Sc. in Mathematics, UCV; Post-Graduate Specialization from Imperial College London and the French Petroleum Institute - IFP) with modern data science, custom scientific programming (Python, MATLAB, FORTRAN), and industry-standard software (Petrel, Gocad-Skua, JACTA, Isatis). He represented PDVSA within the Stanford University (SCRF) research consortium, authored numerous benchmark technical papers, and mentored over 16 geoscientific specialists across global energy organizations.

Core Competencies & Strategic Pillars

Executive Operations & Reserve Certification: Executive leadership in comprehensive subsurface evaluations, compliant reserve audits, and strategic design of EOR/IOR field development plans.
Advanced Geostatistics & 3D Modeling: Expert-level execution of high-resolution 3D sedimentary architectures, complex velocity models, stochastic simulations, and spatial uncertainty quantification.
Digital Transformation & Data Science: Custom geoscientific tool creation, algorithm development, GUI design (MATLAB App Designer), and analytics integration with Power BI and Python to streamline subsurface workflows.
Multidisciplinary Team Leadership: Proven success managing multi-million dollar subsurface projects in giant fields (such as Cantarell, Camargo, Bagre, Carito Mulata and Dación), uniting geophysics, geology, petrophysics, and reservoir engineering.

Selected Career Highlights

OGO Mexico (2014–2022) | Chief Operating Officer / Operations manager: Executive oversight of integrated reservoir studies for regulatory reserve certification and strategic field development plans.
iReservoir (USA) | Senior Technical Advisor: Built complex velocity models and sedimentary architectures for key assets across the United States, Colombia, and Morocco.
Earth Decision-Paradigm (Mexico) | Senior Consultant II: Directed technical execution for offshore and onshore super-giant fields (Cantarell, Camargo, Bagre) and delivered advanced corporate training.
PDVSA-INTEVEP (1991–2003) | Specialist I: Served as PDVSA’s corporate representative at the Stanford Center for Reservoir Forecasting (SCRF) affiliate program—attending annual technical meetings and advanced training—and served as a certified instructor for CIED-PDVSA.

OFAC and Venezuela Relations

Fernando Amaral

Venezuela and PDVSA Relations

Fernando Amaral

Venezuela and PDVSA Relations

Serial entrepreneur, investor, and corporate director with more than 35 years of experience founding, acquiring, scaling, and governing companies across technology, digital transformation, pharmaceutical retail and distribution, banking, and industrial services.

His most distinctive asset is not only the businesses he built, but the depth and durability of the relationships he has cultivated over four decades. Senior decision-makers across government, industry, finance, and civil society continue to take his calls and open doors — a network that today provides Global Investment Alliance with direct, trusted access to the highest levels of PDVSA, the Ministry of Hydrocarbons, and the broader Venezuelan institutional ecosystem required to advance CPP and Empresa Mixta opportunities.

Recognized for strategic vision, high-stakes negotiation, board-level governance, and the ability to convert long-standing personal and professional trust into concrete commercial and institutional outcomes.

Roberto Lambertini

Industry Relations & Risk Management

Roberto Lambertini

Industry Relations & Risk Management

Roberto Lambertini is a Senior Energy Executive and Petroleum Geologist with over 45 years of experience. His solid professional career is deeply rooted in Venezuela, where he served as Schlumberger’s Global Account Director for PDVSA and led technical reservoir teams at PDVSA-INTEVEP. Globally, he has driven commercial strategy and operations across Latin America, leading high-level projects and negotiations in Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, and Panama, alongside experience in the United States and Europe. Roberto holds a B.S. in Geological Engineering from Universidad Central de Venezuela and completed Master's studies in Petroleum Geology at The University of Texas at Austin.

Anelisse Ingebrand

OFAC and US Government & Embassy Relations

Anelisse Ingebrand

OFAC and US Government & Embassy Relations

Anelisse Ingebrand brings more than 20 years of experience in operations, client relations, project management, and international business, with a strong foundation in the oil and gas industry. She began her career at Halliburton, working with major energy companies including Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips.

She currently serves as President & COO of WebCreek, an IT services company specializing in IT staffing and custom software development. At GIA, she supports engagement related to OFAC and U.S. government and embassy relations, bringing a combination of energy-sector experience, executive leadership, and cross-border business expertise.

Anelisse holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Electronic Engineering from Simón Bolívar University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Maine. She is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).

Leadership

Global Investment Alliance

Our Leadership Team

Krishna Vathyam

Antonio Prince

Kent McDougall

Massimo Melandri

Jorge Almonacid

Reinaldo Viloria

OFAC and Venezuela Relations

Fernando Amaral

Roberto Lambertini

Anelisse Ingebrand

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