Throughout its history, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) has seen four of its former general directors be deprived of liberty for investigations related to alleged acts of corruption. The most recent is Víctor Rodríguez Padilla, arrested this Tuesday by agents of the capital’s Prosecutor’s Office, according to the National Detention Registry. President Claudia Sheinbaum has indicated that he only asked to be in charge of the oil company for a year and a half.
Arrest history
Jorge Díaz Serrano, director during the six-year term of José López Portillo, was arrested in 1983 for a million-dollar fraud in the purchase of tankers. He spent five years in prison and was sentenced to a decade, although he was released in 1988 denouncing a political background.
Rogelio Montemayor Seguy, who directed Pemex at the end of Ernesto Zedillo’s government, was accused in 2002 of the “Pemexgate” case: diversion of 1.1 billion pesos to the PRI presidential campaign. Arrested in Texas, he was released on bail and returned to Mexico in 2004, where he was exonerated.
Emilio Lozoya Austin, director with Enrique Peña Nieto, was prosecuted for the Odebrecht and Agronitrogenados cases, accused of money laundering, bribery and criminal association. Extradited from Spain in 2020, in 2021 he was sentenced to preventive detention in the North Prison. In February 2024 he was placed under house arrest.
Carlos Treviño Medina, Lozoya’s successor, was detained in the United States in August 2025, but was released while his trial continues in that country.
In addition, the defunct Strategic Safeguard Directorate, under the command of General Eduardo León Trauwitz, has accumulated almost five years of probation in Canada, awaiting an extradition trial. For that case of protecting the theft of hydrocarbons (“huachicol”) between 2015 and 2016, four former officials – Emilio Cosgaya Rodríguez, Sócrates Alfredo Herrera Pegueros, José Carlos Sánchez Echeverría and Ramón Márquez Ledesma – were sentenced in July 2025 to 31 years and 10 months in prison.
