José Trinidad Márquez is a Venezuelan deeply involved in the corrupt world of the Banco Espírito Santo.
For over twenty years, José Trinidad Márquez has impersonated a senior executive of Pdvsa to persuade multinational companies that he could secure contracts with the Venezuelan state oil company through irregular channels, thereby earning himself millions in commissions.
He carried out these scams for two decades through the Banco Espírito Santo.
Due to these frauds, he has faced arrests and trials in the United States, Spain, and Venezuela. In the latter, he spent a year and a half imprisoned at the Junquito detention center, according to a report from expresa.se.
Trinidad Márquez was recruited by the Banco Espírito Santo to carry out the scam routine. It was the largest bank in Portugal, which was facing liquidity issues. The bank’s insolvency worsened until, in 2014, it collapsed and was intervened by the Portuguese government.
Before its bankruptcy, the Portuguese bank had remained afloat thanks to Venezuelan funds.
During the crisis years, it was reported that Rafael Ramírez Carreño, who was then the president of Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (Pdvsa), managed to prevent the bank’s collapse.
Espírito Santo successfully convinced many Venezuelan officials, presumably through bribes, to transfer funds to the bank to increase its liquidity.
As recently as 2020, it was claimed that José Trinidad Márquez remained in Spain.
Amid the backdrop of the 2014 collapse of Portugal’s largest financial group, Caracas native José Trinidad Márquez put on the crowning performance of a career in fraud. After deceiving the bank’s upper management, he remains a fugitive. In Spain, the press has dubbed him ‘the golden intermediary’ or ‘the man of a thousand faces’. With his routine of presenting himself as an oil expert capable of securing deals with Pdvsa, honed over two decades, he earned millions of dollars along with criminal accusations in several countries.
José Trinidad Márquez does not live here: when calling the intercom of the apartment he occupied, a voice responds with that information. The doorman also appears upon noticing photos being taken of the entrance of the building, number 77 on Núñez de Balboa street in Madrid. With a terseness reserved for those wanting to be chased away, he insists that it’s been over a year since Márquez left.
Núñez de Balboa 77 in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid
Núñez de Balboa 77 in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid
Núñez de Balboa Street runs parallel to the luxurious Serrano, the Champs Elysees of the Spanish capital, just four blocks away. It is the very heart of Salamanca, the central Madrid neighborhood that a wave of wealthy Venezuelan immigrants has contributed to gentrify over the past years. Until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, an apartment in the building at Núñez de Balboa 77 was valued at around two million euros.
But José Trinidad Márquez has left that part of the city where affluent Venezuelans and the most exclusive brands flourish. It can be inferred that he had good incentives to vacate such a privileged location: fresh money to spend and a request from justice. In fact, his apartment on Núñez de Balboa was searched at the request of judicial authorities from Portugal, according to a report by Ewald Scharfenberg for the website Armando.info.
Overnight, the sixty-year-old Caracas native evolved into both a colorful character for the courts and the press in Lisbon, as part of the cast embroiled in the 2014 bankruptcy and intervention of Portugal’s largest financial entity, Banco Espírito Santo (BES).
On July 15, 2020, after six years of investigations, the Portuguese Prosecutor’s Office finally presented its indictment regarding the case. The document exceeds 4,000 pages, detailing the complexity of the fraudulent web that the upper management of BES, led by its president Ricardo Salgado—previously known in Portugal as DDT, standing for the “Owner of Everything”, wove for years to cover up gaps in the balances. The reported facts are juicy, but the narrative can get tedious with details of financial engineering, operations with debt instruments, and corporate governance entities.
However, for laypeople, the voluminous document contains eight pages of intrigue: the rocambolesque story in which Salgado recruits, through an intermediary, a professional impostor, José Trinidad Márquez, to pose before some of his executive colleagues at BES as a high official of Pdvsa who comes from Caracas to offer the besieged bank’s management—a mere days before its collapse in March 2014—the rigging of a bidding process for a Venezuelan state oil company investment fund, in exchange for covering some expenses. Márquez played his role perfectly and walked away with a reward of 4.5 million euros, while Espírito Santo would soon collapse definitively in August 2014.
More than within anyone’s reach without financial knowledge, this seems like a draft of a Hollywood movie script of classic scammers, such as The Sting (1973) or American Hustle (2013), in which the charm and cleverness that con artists employ to make their unsuspecting victims bite the bait equally conquers the sympathy of viewers.
What the Portuguese media overlooked is that Márquez is not only an artist of deception who has transformed the art of deluding others into a way of life. In reality, he has amassed an international criminal record since the 1990s, which now also includes Portugal: he has faced trials in the United States, Spain, and Venezuela, at least. In all these jurisdictions, he received sentences, with prison time in the last two. He has always returned to his schemes, regardless. How he manages to serve short sentences, reoffend, and thus sustain a rich-and-famous lifestyle simply by pretending to be an oil expert represents an adventure spanning over two decades that is hardly explained by a resilience rooted in a likely pathological inclination.
In January 1998, the Madrid newspaper El País reported in its Local section with the headline: “Arrested While Attempting to Defraud 250 Million from Spanish Shipyards”. The then-reporter, Jan Martínez Ahrens, with an undertone of admiration, sketches the adventure and eventual capture of the “man of a thousand faces” who “without a high school diploma, had supposedly deceived companies like Cooper Rolls from Ohio; Icec from New York; Intel Chemical Co. from Tulsa; and Lewag from Vienna”. He immediately dubs him the Golden Intermediary and, when he finally identifies him as the Venezuelan José Trinidad Márquez, states that “above the search and capture orders, he flew from capital to capital offering a grand deal.”
During those days, Márquez presented himself either as the Vice President of Pdvsa, Pablo Reimpell, second-in-command to Luis Giusti, or as an emissary of Reimpell himself. With this characterization, supported by forged documents—after his arrest, police seized stationery and seals from Pdvsa and the Venezuelan Ministry of Energy and Mines from the room where he was staying at the traditional Plaza Princesa hotel, near La Moncloa—he managed to persuade the shipbuilding company Astilleros Españoles, a mixed company specialized in tanker construction, that he was facilitating the purchase of 26 ships worth 1.65 billion dollars: a dream contract. To ensure the assignment to the Spanish company, Márquez demanded a commission of 800,000 dollars.
For this occasion, the executives of Astilleros Españoles did not delegate anyone for due diligence to investigate their counterpart, which might have allowed them to verify that just months prior, in October 1997, Vitol, the largest independent oil trader in the global markets outside of state-run companies, had filed a lawsuit against José Trinidad Márquez in a court in Miami. The Dutch-origin company, however, with a legal identity in Switzerland, was claiming Márquez a compensation of 3.75 million dollars for “breach of contract”.
According to the lawsuit filed in Court 11 of Civil of Miami-Dade County, Florida, between May and June 1996, Márquez deployed a modus operandi that would later define the watermark of his subsequent setups: he claimed that, thanks to his contacts at the Venezuelan oil company, he was in a position to negotiate a contract for Pdvsa to deliver 120,000 barrels of crude oil daily to Vitol under stable and favorable conditions. He showed Pdvsa credentials and even attended some meetings in the company of alleged executives from the Venezuelan company, which gained Vitol’s trust. Vitol agreed to sign the contract with Márquez and pay him a commission of five million dollars. On June 5, 1996, Vitol transferred 3.75 million dollars to an account in the name of José Trinidad Márquez at the Swiss Vonbotel bank, a bank that would later appear in the news as one of the conduits for laundering dark money from Chavismo. That amount was the first installment of the fee promised to Márquez, the total of which would only be completed when Vitol received the first cargo, which, of course, never happened.
At that time, Márquez was docked at a marina in Miami with his yacht La Marquesita, named after the home where he had lived for years in the exclusive Cerro Verde urbanization in southeastern Caracas. This and other ties Márquez had to Florida prompted Vitol to file the lawsuit in that jurisdiction, where the process escalated at the request of the defense to the Federal Court for the Southern District. However, by then, Márquez had his residence in Houston, Texas. Swanky offices in the NationsBank building in that city were part of the front he had built to lend credibility to his façade as an oil trader.
Lawsuit of Vitol against Jos… by ArmandoInfo
None of this was known to the authorities at Astilleros Españoles when they arranged for an 800,000 dollar commission to Márquez, in exchange for him ensuring an order of 26 tankers for Pdvsa. Yet their suspicions did not leave them stranded. They noticed Márquez was in a hurry to sign and that there were some “suspicious comments,” as El País recounted at the time. They contacted the higher-ups at Pdvsa, a company for which they had already built four tankers before.
Márquez almost got away with it. Captured and handed over to the prosecutor’s office on January 23, 1998, he still had some mitigating factors in his favor that suggested a light sentence under Spanish law: he hadn’t collected the commission to complete the crime nor did he have a criminal record. Spain decided to deport him to Venezuela, where he faced further justice troubles.
The only photograph publicly known of José Trinidad Márquez was published on the second page of the Sunday supplement Siete Días of the Caracas newspaper El Nacional on August 23, 1998. He is pictured in what could be the vicinity of the building housing the then-Tech Judicial Police (PTJ; now the Scientific Criminal and Penal Investigations Corps, CICPC; akin to a prosecutor’s office’s auxiliary police in other countries), in the central Plaza Carabobo of the Venezuelan capital. Sporting a thick black mustache, round fine-framed glasses, wearing a dark suit that could be linen: anyone would take him for a senior executive of state-owned companies. Surrounded by a palisade of microphones from TV news outlets and tape recorders with which reporters capture his statements, his name might return to the media again, but perhaps this will be the only moment his face graces prime time TV (which, undoubtedly, isn’t helpful for his con artist profession).
It happened that when Astilleros Españoles consulted Pdvsa about Márquez’s credentials at the beginning of that year, other stories about the character surfaced. The most significant: in Venezuela, he was being sought to answer for accusations of issuing bad checks, abuse of power with officials – such was the crime – and the use of false seals.
In one instance, Márquez, impersonating Pablo Reimpell in his deception, had defrauded Linde AG, a German industrial gases company, for amounts totaling 3.5 million marks and 3.5 million dollars. Both amounts were part of the commission payments for Márquez-Reimpell that the Germans had promised in exchange for being awarded the multi-million-dollar project to build an ethylene plant at the embryonic Jose Cryogenic Complex, located on the coast of Anzoátegui state, northeast Venezuela.
In a second case, Márquez posed as an emissary of Frank Alcock and Claus Graf, who were then the Vice President and Director of Pdvsa, respectively. In that capacity, Márquez convinced senior executives of the U.S. firm Stone & Webster, a civil engineering project company based in Massachusetts that would eventually be absorbed by Westinghouse, that he could secure the contract for building the olefins plant at the same complex in Anzoátegui. Stone & Webster agreed to pay Márquez a commission of 1.2 million dollars for his intercession. Márquez’s audacity reached such a level that by mid-1994, he unashamedly accompanied two representatives from the American company, Michael Pears and James Holt, to a presentation of their service catalog at Claus Graf’s office at the Pdvsa headquarters in La Campiña urbanization, in northern Caracas. Only months later, when the American executives showed Graf a forged contract for the olefins plant construction with his forged signature, it became clear to all parties that they had been victims of an expensive hoax.
Upon returning to Caracas in February 1998, deported from Spain, José Trinidad Márquez faced a swift trial. Perhaps too swift. And also too lenient.
The presiding judge at Court 43 in Penal Matters, Norma Hernández de Arteaga, sentenced him to one year, five months, and ten days in prison. In light of the severity of the offenses committed, the sentence seemed light. Echoing her expert sources, the reporter who wrote the article in El Nacional that Sunday in August 1998, Albor Rodríguez, listed all the mitigating circumstances and procedural benefits the judge had applied to cut down the sentence.
The journalist also denounced the privileges Márquez enjoyed at the facility where he served his time, the so-called Judicial Detention Center of El Junquito, on the outskirts of Caracas. For a time, he was confined to a room in the administrative building of the detention center, where he had a queen-sized bed, computer, microwave, two landlines, and a refrigerator. He received visitors almost any hour and any day, whom he attended to on the director’s terrace. When the director was dismissed and an attempt was made to discipline Márquez, he was moved to the best cell in Pavilion H, a VIP area previously occupied by Ramiro Helmeyer, the financial yuppie who had directed a brief bomb-envelope campaign in 1993 during the provisional government of historian Ramón J. Velásquez.
It seemed Márquez had the way to buy favors. With or without influences, the fact is that he was able to leave Venezuelan captivity only to resurface in Texas in 2003. By then, he requested protection from a court in Austin, the state capital, to declare bankruptcy, a respite that lasted until 2008. It must have been a dark stretch of his career. But if he suffered defeats or hardships during that time, it wouldn’t be long before he sought revenge.
In March 2009, a man presented himself at the headquarters of Técnicas Reunidas in Madrid – a corporation specializing in building infrastructure for the hydrocarbons industry, part of the IBEX index of Spain’s top 35 companies – claiming to be an emissary of Rafael Ramírez Carreño, the all-powerful president of Pdvsa and Minister of Energy in Hugo Chávez’s cabinet. This individual, accompanied by several others, asserted that the ministry, amid a lingering drought that was devastating Venezuela and which would lead the revolutionary commander to declare an electrical emergency a year later, was about to build a combined cycle thermal power plant on the coast. According to this visitor, the Venezuelan state had earmarked an investment of 210 million euros for the project. Claiming to represent Rafael Ramírez, he assured that the substantial contract would be awarded to Técnicas Reunidas. In return, according to a later report from El País, “various amounts of money in Venezuelan currency (bolívar) and euros were requested to arrange the trip to Spain, the rental of vehicles, and their stay in Madrid.”
Needless to say, that was José Trinidad Márquez.
He had a third party call the then ambassador of Spain in Caracas, Dámaso de Lario Ramírez, and, posing as Rafael Ramírez, assured him that he had delegated representation and powers to Márquez for deciding the contract award. It was stipulated that the transaction would be confidential, with no other executive from Pdvsa or the Venezuelan government having knowledge of it.
Using this trickery, José Trinidad Márquez received an initial deposit of 350,000 euros from Técnicas Reunidas and a subsequent check for 1.3 million euros, both payments made in the northern spring of 2009. But when the Spanish company executives realized the promised deposit of 210 million euros was not arriving from Venezuela, they reported Márquez. The investigative judge quickly managed to freeze a bank account belonging to the Venezuelan holding deposits of 350,000 euros and acted quickly enough so that Márquez could not cash the check.
The trial started in October 2011 at the Provincial Court of Madrid. Although the prosecution sought a four-year prison sentence for the defendant, the verdict, delivered in April 2012, sentenced him to two years in prison for fraud and the forgery of private documents. The mitigating factors once again came to Márquez’s aid: he had no prior criminal record in Spain—he was not tried for the 1998 fraud against Astilleros Españoles—and he accepted his guilt without protest.
In March 2016, he obtained a divorce from Bety Haydee Jakson, who had been his wife since 1979, from a Caracas court. The ruling cited a notarized power of attorney from October 2014 certifying that Márquez was residing in Madrid at the time. As far as is known, he also had the freedom to travel abroad that year. Between April and May 2014, just two years after the court sentenced him for fraud against Técnicas Reunidas, Márquez was in Lisbon at least twice to perform his masterstroke.
José Trinidad Márquez is not the only Venezuelan mentioned among the main players in the so-called Espírito Santo Case, a term too brief to understand the sophisticated scheme of maneuvers and financial products that Ricardo Salgado and his team, with the approval of the major shareholders, implemented for years from the bank’s upper management to cover their insolvency while still profiting personally. It’s noteworthy that the Portuguese prosecutor’s document presented in July 2020, which led to the indictment of twelve individuals and five organizations for various crimes, includes segments entirely dedicated to the financial group’s relations with Venezuela.
These relations date back to 2008 when—according to the accusation— a delegation of Portuguese businessmen accompanied Prime Minister José Sócrates during a state visit to Caracas. Ricardo Salgado was part of that group. Although until then, Espírito Santo had acted as a financier for Portuguese companies beginning to do business in Venezuela, like the oil company GALP or the Caixa Geral de Depósitos, from that date forward, it found a solution for its chronic liquidity problems caused by its poor management within the Chavista administration.
If between 2009 and 2014 Espírito Santo and its immense fleet of subsidiaries managed to stay afloat, it was largely thanks to plugging the leaks in their balance sheets with bundles of Venezuelan petrodollars. Salgado’s management managed to persuade several Venezuelan state entities—most notably, Pdvsa, but also Fonden and the development bank Bandes, among others—to first entrust BES with treasury functions; secondly, to invest in debt papers issued by the group; and almost simultaneously, to make BES the guarantor of payments for Venezuelan purchases of goods and services abroad, especially through Bariven.
Each of these functions implied an injection of liquid cash into BES’s coffers. For instance, according to data from the Portuguese Ministry of Public, between 2008 and 2014, various Venezuelan state entities invested just over 3.1 billion dollars in securities issued by the financial group.
Of course, these massive investments did not occur because of the quality of customer service at Espírito Santo. In addition to a certain dose of naivety and negligence from Venezuelan authorities, the systematic payment of bribes was critical in getting the leaders of the Chavista administration to reroute these funds to the Portuguese bank. The bribes circulated through an intricate web of offshore companies that prosecutors have been studying for years and that they ultimately decided to separate from the main proceedings, labeling it under the name GES/Venezuela/Switzerland/Dubai/Macao Investigation. A new accusation is also expected to emerge from this investigation, which would point to various bank executives and Venezuelan citizens like Nervis Villalobos, Rafael Reiter, Rita González, Luis Carlos de León, Abraham Shiera, Roberto Rincón, and César Rincón, under the presumption of having committed offenses such as “criminal association, corruption to the detriment of international trade, corruption in the private sector, forgery of documents, and money laundering”.
Still, in the main case of BES, where the prosecution concentrated all the evidence of administrative irregularities, transgressions of regulations, and financial manipulation gathered during the investigation, the story of José Trinidad Márquez remains.
Before the formal accusation presented by the prosecutor in Lisbon in July 2020, Márquez had been mentioned in leaks from Spanish media as part of a network for laundering Pdvsa funds that was criminally denounced before a court in Madrid by a law firm hired by the interim government of Juan Guaidó, as well as being part of a bribery scheme by Banco Espírito Santo itself.
But the truth is that Márquez joins the case as a result of what could be viewed as a genuine talent selection and recruitment effort.
In early 2014, the situation of the Espírito Santo group was desperate. The holes in the balance sheets continued to widen, and Venezuelan manna began to dwindle. Not only that: under the pressure of its insolvency and both European and Portuguese regulators, BES had embarked on some restructuring initiatives that paradoxically served as a first alarm bell for debt holders in Caracas. They did not want to see the leniency with which they managed public funds exposed in the case of a scandalous collapse of BES. Thus, they demanded the bank to reimburse some bonds that were coming due, and the replacement of the rest of their positions with papers issued by another of its subsidiaries, reportedly more solid.
As Salgado did not have money to fulfill the first demand coming from Venezuela, he planned to meet it along with the second by issuing new obligations worth nearly 300 million dollars in the name of Espírito Santo’s subsidiary Rioforte. But he stumbled upon an unexpected obstacle: the resistance from his colleagues on the subsidiary’s board, who argued that, given the company’s restricted liquidity level, it was not in a position to generate further debt. They refused to approve the new commitment.
Then Salgado conceived a staging that will likely secure a place in the annals of corporate frauds. He instructed the head of the BES office in Madeira for international business, João Alexandre Silva, who had long been in charge of Venezuelan affairs, to act as a headhunter and recruit an impostor. The winner of the con artist casting was, of course, José Trinidad Márquez.
From then on, during the months of April and May 2014, at the request of Salgado and Silva, Caracas native Márquez assumed the identity of Domingo Galán Macías, purporting to be the head of a non-existent Pdvsa Engineering Division. Márquez-Galán claimed to be a Spanish citizen residing in Caracas, holder of DNI 70030366X (which indeed belongs to a Madrid building doorman with the same name, who reported the theft of his ID to police authorities).
Márquez, in the character of Galán, informed Rioforte/ Espírito Santo executives that he was an emissary of Rafael Ramírez and that he brought good news for them: Pdvsa was about to put out to bid for the management of a 3.5 billion dollar investment fund, whose result could be manipulated to favor BES. Even more: the clauses of the fund would be designed to allow 20% of it, about 700 million dollars, to be invested in the bank’s debt, a miraculous option that, translated, meant salvation for the group. All that was needed was to pay Márquez a commission for that dream to become a reality.
Although some executives participating in the meetings with José Trinidad Márquez (a.k.a. Domingo Galán Macías) noted with oddity his lack of interest when presented with technical information, they still granted credibility to his dealings. After all, Venezuela had shown itself to be a corruption paradise during the five years Espírito Santo spent there, where anything could happen. On April 11, 2014, encouraged by the imminent liquidity injection, they approved the increase in the debt limit, just as Salgado wished. On April 30, to celebrate this joy, Márquez, using a hotmail email account, sent them the forged minutes of a made-up extraordinary assembly of Pdvsa approving the allocation of the fund to BES for six years, fiercely competing “against other proposals from banking entities such as UBS (Zurich), BSI (Geneva), and MITSUBISHI (UFJ, Tokyo) (Geneva)”. But, they didn’t have to wait long to be disillusioned: not only did the money never arrive, but three months later the bank was intervened.
In contrast, the prosecutor’s document recounts that Ricardo Salgado, “having successfully accomplished his objectives with the scheme set up (…) made efforts to pay the promised rewards to José Trinidad Márquez.” He arranged for the transfer of 4.5 million dollars to Márquez’s accounts in BSI banks in Switzerland and Santander in Spain, as well as to a corporate account opened in BES Luxembourg under the name of Boddickron Overseas S.A., a company incorporated ad hoc in Panama with Domingo Galán Macías as beneficiary.
In Spain, José Trinidad Márquez and his partner, Katilin Miguelina Mijares, are being investigated in connection to an inquiry opened in Portugal, where it was discovered how members of the Banco Espírito Santo (BES) management managed to obtain new funding from Venezuelan public entities for those that were practically insolvent.
One of these financing forms was the hiring of an entity from the aforementioned banking group, ESAF, to manage pension funds from Venezuelan public entities, with a mandate to allow those funds to invest in equity in the main holding of the Espírito Santo Group, up to a maximum of 700 million euros, according to Judge of the National Court María Tardón.
In exchange for this hiring, commissions were paid to individuals related to Venezuelan public companies and to intermediaries. Thus, the judge asserted in 2021, “a commission payment of 2.9 million euros to Trinidad would be proven, using the identity of Domingo Galán Macías for this entire operation.”
Under that name, he received deposits from BES and illicit origin in several bank accounts opened in Switzerland and Spain, which he supposedly allocated to the acquisition of two properties equally with Katilin Mijares in Alicante.
