Trail of Venezuela’s Stolen Billions Leads to Carribbean Luxury Properties

Bribery, Corruption, Money Launderinggracechurchfcp

Key Findings

  • A Venezuelan under investigation for laundering stolen oil money acquired a lucrative stake in a luxury hotel in Colombia through a company registered in Luxembourg.
  • He and another woman under investigation, the girlfriend of former Venezuelan energy official Javier Alvarado Ochoa, sat on the board of directors of the company that owns the hotel.
  • Three senior executives at an energy consultancy that received a $23 million contract from Venezuelan state power company Corpolec, which was led by Alvarado, also had stakes in the hotel.
  • A Venezuelan expert in anti-money laundering said the setup was “unusual” and should be investigated.
  • Alvarado’s girlfriend is also president of three shell companies that own pricey villas in the Dominican Republic.

More than three years after prosecutors in the tiny European nation of Andorra charged dozens of people with receiving over $2 billion that had been plundered from Venezuela’s state oil company, where exactly the money ended up remains a mystery.

Now journalists may have found some of it. Documents from the OpenLux project show that three of the alleged conspirators, including a former deputy minister and his longtime romantic partner, invested millions of dollars in luxury Caribbean properties at the time of the apparent scam.

The Andorran case alleges that hundreds of millions were stolen from Petróleos de Venezuela, known as PDVSA, between 2006 and 2016, then laundered through Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA). Prosecutors say part of the money, including bribes paid in exchange for contracts with PDVSA and other Venezuelan state energy companies, was funneled into the accounts of 30 people.

Among them were Venezuela’s former deputy electricity minister, Javier Alvarado Ochoa, and his girlfriend, Cecirée Casanova, who worked for a government-owned power company. Also on the prosecutors’ list was a mysterious middleman named José Luis Zabala.

Analysis of the Andorran prosecutors’ documents show that at least $32.7 million passed through BPA accounts associated with Alvarado, while another $21 million or more moved through Zabala’s accounts. Exactly what happened to all this money remains unclear.

But reporters discovered that Zabala and Casanova had ties to shell companies in Luxembourg and Panama, which were used to purchase a five-star hotel in the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena, and villas in an exclusive resort in the Dominican Republic.

Casanova, Zabala, and Alvarado were all under investigation in the U.S., Spain, and Andorra at the time of the transactions.

BPA closed down in 2015, after the U.S. Treasury Department accused the bank of laundering illicit funds from Venezuela, China, Russia, and Spain. Authorities in Andorra filed a suit against BPA in 2018 after a six-year investigation, but the complex case has stalled.

“The defendants have hired the biggest law firms, the biggest experts, and that is why it has not progressed as fast as we would like,” said Zair Mundaray, a former Venezuelan prosecutor.

The case is sensitive, because it could “expose officials from Andorra itself, and that makes transparency very difficult,” added Mundaray, who fled Venezuela in late 2017 and now lives in Colombia.

Casanova, Zabala, and Alvarado did not respond to requests for comment.

Article credit: https://www.occrp.org/en/openlux/trail-of-venezuelas-stolen-billions-leads-to-caribbean-luxury-properties