Lack of banking control allowed transactions for almost 5,000 million dollars linked to Chavismo | International

Venezuela has an extensive chapter in the so-called FinCEN Files known on Sunday. The leak of more than 2,000 reports of suspicious financial activity detected by banks, obtained by BuzzFeed News and analyzed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ, for its acronym in English), reveals how despite the history of allegations that there is about corruption associated with the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro money continued to flow. The investigation that the ICIJ worked with the Armando.info portal of Venezuela indicates that more than 4.8 billion dollars in suspicious transactions, which occurred between 2009 and 2017, are linked to the South American country. Of this amount, 70% involves state agencies such as the Ministry of Finance and the state oil company PDVSA, whose management is prostrated by decades of corruption and mismanagement.

The amount is much lower than estimates such as those of the opposition National Assembly, which indicate that 400,000 million dollars from Venezuelans have gone down the pipe of corruption in two decades. In 2019, Venezuela was the most corrupt country in Latin America and the Caribbean according to Transparency International indicators. The leak of the FinCEN Files documents now shows, in any case, the mechanisms that allowed the money from the State coffers to go to accounts abroad.

Among the revelations are the transactions for 262 million dollars that the Portuguese Banco Espirito Santo processed – dissolved in 2014 after a laundering investigation linked to Venezuela – in an account of a company that managed the assets of the family of Alejandro Ceballos, a businessman of construction, passionate about horses, who until now had been in the shadows. The payments, made between 2013 and 2014, were related to a contract for the construction of 1,540 social housing units in San Francisco de Yare, on the outskirts of Caracas, signed with PDVSA. The buildings took years to complete, but upon transfers from the government, bank compliance officers detected “overpayments” to Ceballos’s relatives. The alert came too late and money flowed through the financial system.

Another of the Venezuelans involved in the leak is Alejandro Betancourt, the young energy magnate named by the contracts he made with the government of Hugo Chávez to supply equipment in the midst of the 2009 electricity crisis, which 10 years later has worsened. Betancourt has managed to get rid of the accusations and has started business in Spain.

In the FinCEN Files there are also traces of money moved by Álex Saab long before he was sanctioned by the United States and accused of money laundering from his contracts with CLAP, the subsidized, low-quality and overpriced food program, with the that Nicolás Maduro has been trying to alleviate the shortage since 2015. His transactions through an account in a bank in Antigua and Barbuda were already raising red flags, according to Roberto Deniz’s research published in Armando.info.

Of at least 26 Venezuelan individuals and entities named in the leaked files, only three have US sanctions. “The impunity that many Boliburgueses enjoy is a direct consequence of the banks’ failure to apply appropriate monitoring to the financial activities of their clients,” says one of the reports in the series that quotes Zair Mundaray, a former Venezuelan prosecutor. in the area of ​​financial crimes in exile since 2017. “None of the banks investigated enough, because what really happened was the looting of a country,” says Mundaray in the report.

In the files there are transactions linked to Samark López, designated by Washington as one of the financial operators of the Minister of Oil, Tareck El Aissami, one of Maduro’s strongmen that the United States has included in its list of most wanted criminals. The suspicious movements of money occurred when El Aisami was governor of the Aragua State, located in the central region of the country.

Also included is Martín Lustgarten, a financial expert accused in 2015 of laundering money for Venezuelan drug traffickers and businessmen, and Raúl Gorrín, owner of the news channel Globovisión, accused of laundering in 2018. The Gorrín television station was sanctioned by the Treasury Department, which a few months ago led to the temporary closure of the AT&T-owned satellite television operator DirecTV, due to the impossibility of taking out of its Grill the private signal with a line related to the Government. Lustgarten managed to evade investigations and is now cooperating with US authorities by snitching on former clients, newspapers revealed. Miami Herald and Miami herald, which were part of the FinCEN Files.

The global investigation revealed that large banks consistently challenge the Treasury Department’s control, through its financial intelligence unit better known by its acronym FinCEN. Thus they ensure that the accused, convicted and sanctioned can continue operating with the money that they manage to enter the banking system. According to the ICIJ, this supervisory division, with approximately 300 employees, analyzes the more than two million suspicious files that bank officials produce each year with very few tools to investigate their clients, sometimes with just a Google search. . The FinCEN Files, according to what the ICIJ has said, add an additional piece to the gear that supports crime around the world revealed five years ago in the Panama Papers, which exposed the network of shell companies in tax havens that they cover up the money of powerful corrupt people, criminals and evaders.