By Isabel Guerrero
armando.info
Whether in a command center of the self-proclaimed Bolivarian Revolution or in an exclusive condominium in Miami, Venezuelan Army officer Sergio Caldera García knows how to carve out his space. This was evident in 2014, after years in charge of food distribution within companies such as Corporación CASA, Abastos Bicentenario, and Pdval. Together with his wife, he reinvented himself as a prominent businessman in Florida, amassing valuable real estate and a network of companies—some of which are offshore.
For six years, from 2007 to 2013, Colonel Sergio Ramón Caldera García strided through the high echelons of the chavista government as a trusted official in a strategic area: food supply. It was a time of abundance, when the high oil prices and the president Hugo Chávez’s readiness for public spending fueled not only colossal budgets for food imports but also illicit enrichment temptations.
Caldera García’s career as a public servant hit a snag over an $11.8 million hole in a contract to sell meat to Venezuela sourced from Paraguay, for which he was responsible and which was publicly reported by the press in that South American country in 2013. After that, he still had time to occupy the management of the Ministry of Water and Air Transport’s office for a year—the first under Nicolás Maduro’s government, until March 2014. His tenure there was little more than a prelude for Colonel García, who in Holy Week of 2014, packed his bags and left what initially seemed like an extended sabbatical but turned into a permanent retreat, a departure from which he didn’t even wait for his military promotion to brigadier general, which had been delayed by a year and was due for July.
His self-imposed exile and reinvention turned him into a businessman in Miami, the sinful Babylon that contrasts starkly with the slogans of the self-proclaimed Bolivarian Revolution, but a dark object of desire for many of its leaders.
By late April 2014, the ex-official registered the company Building & Supplies RD LLC in Florida. At that point, he already owned Seranca S.A., incorporated in Panama (2009), and Belfast Resources LTD, registered in the British Virgin Islands (2011), according to documents accessed by Armando.info. His wife, Carol María Gallardo Aguilar, also registered companies in Miami and has been his partner in these ventures.
At some point in 2016, Caldera García, now sporting civilian attire and multiple real estate holdings, partnered with Venezuelan Rafael Adolfo Boggio Sulbarán in the consultancy and maintenance service company MPR Property Maintenance & Consulting LLC. A litigation ended with Boggio out of the picture, granting Caldera full control of the firm. Court documents mention that Caldera “attempted to use the company for his immigration status adjustment and that of his family but was unsuccessful.” Other compatriots’ names surfaced during the litigation, including Baudelio Medrano—former director of the now-defunct Office of Identification and Immigration (Onidex), now called Saime—who left Venezuela but had previously served as state officials or contractors, a difficult trace to erase.
Armando.info attempted to contact Sergio Caldera through the law firm that handled the military’s interests in the lawsuit against Boggio, but as of the report’s submission date, there was no response.
Judicial documents of the c… by ArmandoInfo
Millionaire Networks
In July 2021, a charge was made public in a federal court in South Florida against Venezuelan, of Syrian origin, Naman Wakil, accused of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Wakil, who was a leading supplier to the Venezuelan state, owns properties in exclusive areas of Miami-Dade County, including Coconut Grove, Sunny Isles, and Indian Creek. The ongoing judicial investigation against Naman Wakil in the US includes a batch of documents marked as confidential due to containing “sensitive information” about the accused and his associates.
The list of case files mentions Sergio Caldera and Carol Gallardo linked to accounts registered in the Cayman Islands, a known tax haven, or in U.S. entities like Citibank, Bank Of America, and Merrill Lynch. Additionally, the Caldera-Gallardo couple is associated with apartment 6A in Two Park Grove Condominium, an exclusive residential tower completed in 2018 in Coconut Grove, south of Miami. The property prices in this location vary depending on size, ranging between $3.4 million and $18 million.
According to property deeds obtained for Armando.info through the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), there exists a trust agreement that the military and his wife signed with a third party on September 26, 2019, through C&G Team Revocable Trust, of which both Venezuelans have been beneficiaries since November 26, 2018. This type of revocable trust is commonly used to safeguard large assets, protecting them from legal actions and including provisions for changing the final beneficiary.
Coincidentally or not, Caldera was a neighbor of Wakil in Coconut Grove. At the time of his arrest, the Syrian-Venezuelan businessman was living with his family in a $3.5 million apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay, as cited by El Nuevo Herald of Miami.
Judicial Document of the case… by ArmandoInfo
Caldera and Wakil shared more than just connections. They both coincided—one as a manager, the other as a supplier—at the Ministry of Food when the Colonel presided over the Agricultural Supply and Services Corporation, S.A. (LA CASA, also known as CASA) in 2010, which began liquidation in 2016. Then, in 2011, he was part of the board of directors of the Bicentennial Supply Network and the Food Producer and Distributor (Pdval), another state corporation mired in scandals of food sales fraud, price inflation, and millions in losses from expired or unsold products since their entry point into the country.
In what is called the Pudreval case—the pun the press and public coined for the discovery of thousands of tons of spoiled food in abandoned containers in Puerto Cabello in 2010—Wakil managed to secure state contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to bring cheap, near-expiry meat from Brazil, all while charging the Venezuelan government regular prices. Though Wakil is often linked with Carlos Osorio, also an Army officer who preceded Caldera in both the CASA role and the Food Ministry, it is hard to imagine that Caldera could have remained unaware of the scale and nature of these businesses.
In fact, during that time, Pdval purchased more from its suppliers than it could handle or might even need. This was admitted by former Pdval president Luis Pulido in a report presented to the Puerto Cabello court, which ultimately ordered his arrest. Pulido stated “that food was bought in excess and it was ‘humanly impossible’ to proceed with distribution.”
Wakil remained entrenched in the food import game for years. “In June 2012, Wakil supplied the Ministry of Food in Venezuela with 70,000 metric tons of beef, pasta, and cooking oil, charging $5,340 per ton of beef,” reported Bloomberg.
U.S. authorities confirmed that Wakil paid bribes to “high-ranking officials of the state food company called CASA from 2010 to 2014 and then laundered the proceeds of those bribes in Florida’s Southern District in subsequent years.” According to documents from the Florida court, the trader invested the money he obtained from the inflated transactions illegitimately in the Miami-Dade real estate sector. The official investigation adds that the U.S. government could prove that this fraudulent scheme started in 2007.
In the Panama Papers, the global investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) following the leak of documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca, highlighted Naman Wakil’s role in food import businesses to Venezuela. In 2013, the lawyer for the Syrian trader noted that his client had $400 million available to set up an offshore company.
In 2010, CASA awarded a contract for $41.6 million for 8,000 tons of Paraguayan meat, with a final cost of $5,200 per ton. Who signed the advances? Sergio Caldera.
The Paraguayan Ray
It was during the time of Bishop Fernando Lugo, an ally of the regional bolivarian left, in the presidency of Paraguay. The negotiation between Caracas and Asunción for the commercialization of meat was orchestrated in advance to execute it in the shortest possible time. So much so that the Paraguayan counterparty was created ad hoc by two Venezuelans, James Varnador and Juan Carlos Águila Barajas, just six months before signing the contract, as reported by Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color, which tracked the case.
It involved the company Agropecuaria ParaKe S.A., registered during late-night hours in Paraguay. With it, Sergio Caldera García signed in November 2010, when he had just taken over as president of CASA, a contract for an initial cost of $38.93 million, which increased on December 23. On December 30, CASA disbursed the first advance payment of $10.92 million. However, by that date, not a single gram of meat had been received, according to reports by Venezuelan and Paraguayan media in 2013.
The following year, in April 2011, Caldera would approve the second payment of $10.92 million, even though the product still hadn’t reached Venezuela. This raised enough suspicion to drag him into a tense power struggle, and in June, he was replaced by Carlos Osorio, who served as Minister of Food and had directly managed contracts with Naman Wakil. Two weeks after the Colonel’s exit, ParaKe S.A. was demanded to return the advances or deliver the food within 50 days.
Sergio Caldera as president of the CASA Corporation signed the contract with Agropecuaria ParaKe S.A. for the commercialization of 8,000 tons of Paraguayan meat, with a total cost of $41.6 million preferential. Image taken from: Blog Producto Venezolano.
The details of the amounts are found in a sentencing from the Political-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) of Venezuela, suing the Paraguayan company for breach of contract in 2017. The document avoids assigning individual responsibility to Sergio Caldera in the case.
In the end, of the 8,000 tons of committed meat, which were to be distributed “!for the Mercal Plan to benefit the population,” according to the phrasing of the judicial document, only 1,316 tons were received. In August 2011, the Venezuelan government requested the Paraguayan company to return nearly $15 million plus a penalty payment of $1.2 million. According to information that circulated in Paraguayan media, ParaKe S.A. agreed to send the amount in bolivars of the advance calculated at the official dollar rate, to be paid in two installments, but the TSJ ruling sets the amount at approximately 70 million bolivars -including the fine- that needed to be reimbursed in dollars.
The government paid in foreign currency and was reimbursed in bolivars calculated at the official dollar rate. This was the arrangement that ultimately remained on the table. However, there was no repair agreement, and the embezzlement had only Felix Humberto Álvarez Estévez, Paraguayan general manager held accountable who was sentenced to three years but only served one at a detention center of the Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) in Caracas in 2011 before being deported back to his country, disappearing from public radar. Although Sergio Caldera signed and approved the contract, he was never called to testify.
Like almost every scheme of revolutionary Venezuela, this case had a connection to Miami, where Sergio Caldera established the hub of his businesses. From the US, the company Giroski Agro Group LLC, owned by Venezuelan Benjamín Rosales—who is indicated as close to General Rodolfo Marco Torres—with a branch in the La Castellana neighborhood in northeast Caracas, operated to establish the Paraguayan company ParaKe S.A. and support it with its history as an old supplier to the chavista government. Nevertheless, he was also never called to testify or investigated.
In December 2020, a decision from the TSJ found it necessary “to notify the Liquidating Board of the Agricultural Supply and Services Corporation, S.A. (LA CASA, S.A.), the Unique Corporation of Productive and Food Services, C.A., and the Ministry of Popular Power for Food” to proceed with the demand that was in the citation stage against Agropecuaria ParaKe, S.A.