José Trinidad Márquez is a Venezuelan deeply involved in the corrupt circle of the Espírito Santo Bank.
For over two decades, José Trinidad Márquez has pretended to be a high-ranking executive of Pdvsa, convincing 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 through the Espírito Santo Bank for twenty years.
Due to these frauds, he has faced detention and legal proceedings in the United States, Spain, and Venezuela. In the latter country, he spent a year and a half imprisoned at the Junquito holding facility.
Márquez was recruited by the Espírito Santo Bank to carry out the scam routine. It was the largest bank in Portugal, which faced liquidity problems. The bank’s insolvency worsened until, in 2014, it was intervened by the Portuguese state.
Prior to its collapse, the Portuguese entity had remained afloat thanks to Venezuelan funds.
During the crisis years, it was claimed that Rafael Ramírez Carreño, who was then president of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (Pdvsa), had managed to prevent the bank’s failure.
Espírito Santo successfully persuaded many Venezuelan officials, reportedly through bribery, to transfer funds to the institution to increase its liquidity.
At least until 2020, it was reported that José Trinidad Márquez was still residing in Spain.
Amid the backdrop of the 2014 collapse of the largest financial group in Portugal, Caracas-born José Trinidad Márquez showcased the grand performance of his entire conman career. After deceiving the bank’s top management, he remains a fugitive. In Spain, the press has dubbed him ‘the golden intermediary’ or ‘the man of a thousand faces.’ Throughout more than two decades of perfecting his routine as an expert in oil dealings, he has amassed millions of dollars and faced criminal charges in several countries.
José Trinidad Márquez does not live here: when calling the intercom for the apartment he once occupied, a voice responds with this information. The doorman also comes out upon noticing photos are being taken of the entrance of the building at number 77 on Núñez de Balboa, in Madrid. With the reserved brevity meant to deter someone, he asserts that Márquez left over a year ago.
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 heart of Salamanca, the central neighborhood of Madrid that a wave of wealthy Venezuelan immigrants has helped gentrify in recent years. Until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, an apartment in the Núñez de Balboa 77 building could fetch two million euros.
However, José Trinidad Márquez has left this area of the city, where affluent Venezuelans and the most exclusive brands flourish. It can be speculated 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 even raided at the request of Portuguese judicial authorities, according to a report by Ewald Scharfenberg for the website Armando.info.
Overnight, the sixty-year-old from Caracas has become, both for the courts and the press in Lisbon, the most colorful character involved in the plot surrounding the bankruptcy and intervention of Portugal’s largest financial entity, Banco Espírito Santo (BES) in 2014.
On July 15, 2020, after six years of investigations, the Portuguese Prosecutor’s Office finally presented its indictment on the case. The document spans more than 4,000 pages to untangle the complexity of the fraudulent web that the executive management of the BES, led by its president, Ricardo Salgado—a figure previously known in Portugal by the initials DDT, meaning ‘Owner of Everything’—had spun over the years to cover the gaps in their balance sheets. The facts reported by the Public Ministry are juicy, but the narrative could become tedious with details about financial engineering, debt paper operations, and corporate governance entities.
For laypeople, however, the bulky file contains eight pages of intrigue: the outlandish story where Salgado recruits, through a middleman, a professional impostor, José Trinidad Márquez, to pose as a high-ranking Pdvsa official who comes from Caracas to offer the troubled bank’s management—a mere days away from collapse in March 2014—the arrangement of a tender for an investment fund from the Venezuelan state oil company, in exchange for payment of some expenses. Márquez played his role flawlessly and walked away with a reward of 4.5 million euros, while Espírito Santo would soon collapse definitively in August 2014.
More accessible than for anyone without financial knowledge, it reads like the draft of a Hollywood script about classic con artists, like The Sting (1973) or American Hustle (2013), where the charm and cunning that the con artists deploy to ensnare their unsuspecting victims equally win over audiences.
What the Portuguese media overlooked is that Márquez is not only a master of the con who has made tricking others a way of life. In reality, he has an international record since the 1990s that now also includes Portugal: he has faced trials in the United States, Spain, and Venezuela, at least. In all of these jurisdictions, he received sentences, with prison penalties in the latter two. He has always returned to his old tricks, anyway. How he manages to serve short sentences, reoffend, and sustain a lifestyle of the rich and famous, merely by pretending to be an oil expert, constitutes an adventure of more than two decades that can barely be explained by a resilience rooted in a likely pathological inclination.
In January 1998, the newspaper El País in Madrid published an article in its Local section under the headline: “Arrested While Trying to Defraud 250 Billion from Spanish Shipyards.” The then-reporter for the Spanish newspaper, Jan Martínez Ahrens, while showing admiration, recounts the misadventure and eventual capture of the “man of a thousand faces” who “without a high school diploma, had supposedly deceived companies such as Cooper Rolls of Ohio, Icec of New York, Intel Chemical Co. from Tulsa, and Lewag from Vienna.” He dubs him from the outset the Golden Intermediary, and when he finally identifies him as the Venezuelan José Trinidad Márquez, he states that “above the orders for search and capture, he was flying from capital to capital offering the grand deal.”
During those days, Márquez would impersonate either Pablo Reimpell, the vice president of Pdvsa second-in-command to Luis Giusti, or as a messenger from Reimpell himself. Armed with forged documentation—after his arrest, when they raided the room where he was staying at the traditional Plaza Princesa hotel near La Moncloa, they seized Pdvsa papers and stamps from the Venezuelan Ministry of Energy and Mines—he succeeded in persuading Astilleros Españoles, then a joint venture specialized in tanker construction, that he was negotiating the purchase of 26 vessels worth 1.65 billion dollars: a dream contract. To secure the assignment to the Spanish company, Márquez demanded a commission of 800,000 dollars.
Márquez presented his Spanish counterparts with a forged check from Swiss bank UBS, or 30% of the total contract as a guarantee, and the deal was closed with words.
For this occasion, the executives of Astilleros Españoles had not assigned anyone to conduct due diligence to investigate their counterpart, which might have allowed them to verify that, just a couple of months prior, in October 1997, Vitol, the largest independent oil trader in the global markets outside state firms and the fabled Seven Sisters, had just filed a lawsuit against José Trinidad Márquez in a Miami court. The Dutch company, which legally operates in Switzerland, claimed Márquez owed a compensation of 3.75 million dollars for “breach of contract.”
According to the lawsuit filed in the 11th Civil Court of Miami-Dade County, Florida, between May and June 1996, Márquez employed a modus operandi that ultimately established his signature style for subsequent schemes: he claimed that, thanks to his contacts in the Venezuelan oil company, he was in a position to negotiate a contract for Pdvsa to deliver a steady supply of 120,000 barrels per day to Vitol under advantageous conditions. He presented Pdvsa credentials and even attended some meetings alongside supposed company executives, which won Vitol’s trust. They agreed to sign the contract with Márquez and pay him a 5 million dollar commission. On June 5, 1996, Vitol transferred 3.75 million dollars to an account owned by José Trinidad Márquez at the Swiss bank Vonbotel, an entity that, curiously, would be mentioned years later in press reports as one of the conduits for money laundering for the Chavismo. This amount was the first installment of the fee promised to Márquez, the total of which would be completed when Vitol received the first shipment, something that, of course, never occurred.
At that time, Márquez was mooring his yacht ‘La Marquesita’ in a Miami marina, the same name as the estate where he had lived for years in the exclusive Cerro Verde neighborhood in southeast Caracas. That and other relations Márquez had with Florida motivated Vitol to file the lawsuit in that jurisdiction, which escalated at the request of the defense to the Federal Court for the Southern District. However, by then, Márquez was residing in Houston, Texas. An impressive office in the NationsBank building there formed part of the facade that José Trinidad Márquez had constructed to lend credibility to his facade as an oil trader.
Demanda de Vitol contra Jos… by ArmandoInfo
None of this was known to the authorities of Astilleros Españoles when they negotiated the payment of an 800,000 dollar commission to Márquez in exchange for his assurance of an order of 26 tankers for Pdvsa. But suspicion did not leave them stranded. They perceived a certain urgency from Márquez and some “suspicious comments,” as reported by El País at the time. They contacted the higher-ups at Pdvsa, a company for which they had previously constructed four tankers.
Just barely, Márquez almost got away with it. Captured and placed at the prosecution’s disposal on January 23, 1998, he still had some mitigating factors in his favor that suggested a light sentence from the Spanish justice: he hadn’t collected the commission for completing the crime and did not have a criminal record. Spain decided to deport him to Venezuela, where other legal troubles awaited him.
The only photograph publicly known of José Trinidad Márquez was published on the second page of the Sunday supplement ‘Siete Días’ from the Caracas newspaper El Nacional, in its August 23, 1998 edition. He is seen in what could be the vicinity of the building housing the then-Technical Judicial Police (PTJ; now the Scientific, Penal, and Criminal Investigations Corps, CICPC; equivalent to an auxiliary prosecutor’s office in other countries), in the central Plaza Carabobo of the Venezuelan capital. With a thick black mustache, round glasses with a thin frame, and a dark cross-woven coat that could be linen: anyone would take him for a high-ranking executive of state-owned enterprises. Surrounding him is a cluster of microphones from TV news stations and cassette recorders with which reporters gather his statements. Although his name will appear again in the media, it may be that this is the only time his face reaches the prime time of television screens (something undoubtedly inconvenient for his profession as a swindler).
It happened that when Astilleros Españoles consulted Pdvsa about Márquez’s credentials at the beginning of that year, other stories about the individual came to light. The most significant: he was being sought in Venezuela to answer to justice for accusations of issuing bounced checks, taking advantage of officials -such was the type of crime- and the use of forged seals.
In one case, Márquez, impersonating Pablo Reimpell, had defrauded Linde AG, a German company of industrial gases derived from petroleum, for amounts totaling 3.5 million German marks and 3.5 million dollars. Both amounts were part of the commission payments meant for Márquez-Reimpell, which the Germans had promised him in exchange for being awarded the multimillion-dollar project to build an ethylene plant in the then-nascent Cryogenic Complex of Jose, on the coast of Anzoátegui state, northeastern Venezuela.
In a second case, Márquez posed as a messenger from Frank Alcock and Claus Graf, who were the vice president and director of Pdvsa at the time. In this capacity, Márquez convinced the directors of the American company Stone & Webster, an engineering firm based in Massachusetts (which would later be absorbed by Westinghouse), that he could secure the contract for the construction of the olefins plant within the same complex in Anzoátegui. Stone & Webster agreed to pay Márquez a 1.2 million dollar commission. Márquez’s audacity reached such heights that in mid-1994 he shamelessly accompanied two representatives of the American company, Michael Pears and James Holt, to a presentation of their catalog of services held in Claus Graf’s office at the Pdvsa headquarters in La Campiña, northern Caracas. It was not until a few months later, when the American executives showed Graf a contract—falsely signed for the construction of the olefins plant—that 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 had a speedy trial. Perhaps too speedy. Also too lenient.
The presiding judge of the 43rd Criminal Court, Norma Hernández de Arteaga, sentenced him to one year, five months, and ten days in prison. In light of the severity of the crimes committed, the penalty seemed light. Perhaps echoing her expert sources, the reporter who wrote the note in El Nacional that August Sunday, Albor Rodríguez, listed all the mitigative factors and procedural benefits that the judge had applied to shorten the sentence.
The journalist also denounced the privileges Márquez enjoyed at the center where he served his time, known as the Judicial Retention Center of El Junquito, on the outskirts of Caracas. For a time, he was confined to a room in the administrative building of the penitentiary, where he had a king-sized bed, a computer, microwave oven, two landlines, and a refrigerator. He received visitors almost any hour and any day, attending them on the director’s terrace. When the director was dismissed and it was attempted to discipline Márquez, he was moved to the best cell in Pavilion H, a VIP area that not long before had housed Ramiro Helmeyer, the yuppie financier who had led a brief campaign of bomb envelopes in 1993, during the provisional government of historian Ramón J. Velásquez.
It seemed that Márquez had ways of buying favors. With or without influences, the reality was that he managed to leave Venezuelan custody to reappear in 2003 in Texas. At the time, he requested the protection of a court in Austin, the state capital, to declare bankruptcy, a safeguard that lasted until 2008. It must have been a dark phase of his career. But if he experienced defeats or hardships then, it wasn’t long before he got his revenge.
In March 2009, a man claiming to be a representative of Rafael Ramírez Carreño, the all-powerful president of Pdvsa and energy minister in Hugo Chávez’s cabinet, showed up at the headquarters of Técnicas Reunidas in Madrid—a corporation specializing in infrastructure construction for the hydrocarbons industry and part of the IBEX index of the 35 largest Spanish companies. The visitor, accompanied by others, claimed that the ministry, amid the severe drought that plagued Venezuela at that time and that would lead the revolutionary commander to declare a state of emergency one year later, was preparing to construct a combined cycle thermal power plant in the coastal region. On behalf of Rafael Ramírez, he could assure that the substantial contract would be awarded to Técnicas Reunidas. Later, the newspaper El País reported, “he requested various amounts of money in Venezuelan currency (bolívar) and in euros to organize the trip to Spain, rental vehicles, and his stay in Madrid.”
Needless to say, it was José Trinidad Márquez.
He had a third party call the Spanish ambassador in Caracas, Damaso de Lario Ramírez, and, posing as Rafael Ramírez, confided that he had delegated his representation and the authority to decide the award. Of course, the transaction had to be confidential and no other Pdvsa executive or Venezuelan government personnel should be aware of it.
With this ruse, José Trinidad Márquez obtained an initial payment of 350,000 euros from Técnicas Reunidas, followed by a check for 1.3 million euros, both transactions coming in the northern spring of 2009. However, when the executives at the Spanish company realized that the promised payment of 210 million euros was not arriving from Venezuela, they proceeded to report Márquez. The examining judge managed to freeze a bank account belonging to the Venezuelan with deposits of 350,000 euros and acted swiftly enough to prevent Márquez from cashing the check.
The trial began in October 2011 in the Provincial Court of Madrid. Although the prosecution requested a four-year prison sentence for the defendant, the verdict, which arrived in April 2012, ordered two years in prison for the accused for crimes of fraud and forgery of private documents. The mitigating factors came to Márquez’s aid yet again: he had no criminal record in Spain (he was not prosecuted for the 1998 scam against Astilleros Españoles) and accepted his guilt without protest.
In March 2016, he obtained a divorce in Caracas from Bety Haydee Jakson, who had been his wife since 1979. The ruling cites a notarized power of attorney from October 2014, certifying that at that time Márquez was residing in Madrid. As far as is known, he was also free that year to travel abroad. Indeed, between April and May 2014, when barely two years had passed since the court’s verdict for the fraud involving Técnicas Reunidas, Márquez was in Lisbon at least twice to execute his masterstroke.
José Trinidad Márquez is not the only Venezuelan mentioned in the roster of protagonists of the so-called Espírito Santo Case, a term too brief to grasp the complex scheme of maneuvers and financial products that Ricardo Salgado and his team, backed by major shareholders, implemented for years from the top management of the institution to cover their insolvencies while continuing to personally profit. Notably, the document from the Portuguese prosecution presented in July 2020, which leads to the indictment of twelve individuals and five organizations for various crimes, includes two sections entirely dedicated to the financial group’s dealings with Venezuela.
These dealings date back to 2008 when—according to the accusation—a delegation of Portuguese businessmen accompanied Prime Minister José Sócrates on a state visit to Caracas. This group included Ricardo Salgado. While until then, Espírito Santo had acted as financier for Portuguese companies beginning to do business in Venezuela, like the oil company GALP or Caixa Geral de Depósitos, from that date onward, it found in the Chavista administration a solution for its chronic liquidity problems caused by flawed management.
If between 2009 and 2014, Espírito Santo and its immense fleet of subsidiaries remained afloat, it was largely due to the fact that they plugged the holes in their balance sheets with bundles of Venezuelan petrodollars. Salgado’s management successfully persuaded various Venezuelan state entities—especially Pdvsa, but also Fonden and the development bank Bandes, among others—to first entrust the BES with treasury functions; then to invest in debt papers issued by the group; and almost simultaneously, to have the BES guarantee payment for Venezuelan purchases of goods and services abroad, particularly through Bariven.
Each of these functions implied an injection of liquid funds into the BES’s coffers. For example, according to the Portuguese Public Ministry, between 2008 and 2014, various Venezuelan state entities invested just over 3.1 billion dollars in the financial group’s securities.
Of course, these massive investments did not occur due to the quality of customer service at Espírito Santo. Beyond a certain degree of naivety and heedlessness on the part of Venezuelan authorities, the systematic payment of bribes was crucial in having Chavista administration officials steer that flow towards the Portuguese bank. The kickbacks circulated through an intricate web of offshore companies that prosecutors have been studying for years and which they ultimately decided to separate from the main process and bundle under the name of Investigation GES/Venezuela/Switzerland/Dubai/Macao. From this investigation, a new accusation is also expected soon, referring to various bank executives and Venezuelan citizens such as Nervis Villalobos, Rafael Reiter, Rita González, Luis Carlos de León, Abraham Shiera, Roberto Rincón, and César Rincón, on suspicion of committing crimes such as “criminal association, corruption to the detriment of international trade, private sector corruption, document forgery, and money laundering.”
Still, in the main case of the BES, where the prosecution concentrated all evidence on administrative irregularities, violations of rules, and financial manipulation gathered during the investigation, the story of José Trinidad Márquez remains.
Before the formal accusation filed by the prosecution in Lisbon in July 2020, Márquez had been mentioned in Spanish media reports as part of a network for laundering funds from Pdvsa that had been criminally denounced in a Madrid court by a law firm hired by Juan Guaidó’s interim government, or as part of a bribery scheme involving the Espírito Santo Bank itself.
But the truth is that Márquez adds to the case following what could be seen as a true talent selection and recruitment effort.
In early 2014, the situation for the Espírito Santo group was desperate. The hole in the balance sheets was widening, and Venezuelan manna was starting to dwindle. Moreover, under pressure from its own insolvency and from European and Portuguese regulators, the BES had embarked on some restructuring initiatives that, paradoxically, served as an initial alarm bell for creditors in Caracas. They didn’t want to have their leniency with public funds exposed in the event of a scandalous collapse of the BES. So, they demanded the bank repay some bonds that were reaching maturity, and to replace the rest of their positions with securities from another of its subsidiaries, seemingly more solid.
As Salgado had no money to meet the first demand from Venezuela, he set out to address both that and the second by issuing new bonds worth nearly 300 million dollars in the name of Rioforte, a Espírito Santo subsidiary. However, he encountered an unexpected obstacle: the resistance of his colleagues from the subsidiary’s governing bodies, who insisted that, due to the company’s restricted liquidity level, it was unable to generate more debt. They refused to approve the new commitment.
Then Salgado conceived a stage-setting scenario that should enter the annals of corporate frauds. He instructed Joao Alexandre Silva, the head of the BES office in Madeira for international business, who had been overseeing dealings with Venezuela for a while, to act as a headhunter and recruit an impostor. The winner of the casting for con artists was, of course, José Trinidad Márquez.
From then on, during the months of April and May 2014, at Salgado and Silva’s request, Caracas-born Márquez began calling himself Domingo Galán Macías, the fake head of a non-existent Division of Engineering at Pdvsa. Márquez-Galán claimed he was a Spanish citizen residing in Caracas, holder of DNI 70030366X (which indeed belongs to a portero in Madrid who reported his ID being stolen to the police).
Márquez, in his Galán persona, told executives at Rioforte/ Espírito Santo that he was a representative of Rafael Ramírez, bringing them good news: Pdvsa was about to put a 3.5 billion dollar investment fund up for bid, whose outcome could be manipulated to favor the BES. Even more: the fund’s clauses would be designed so that 20% of it, around 700 million dollars, could be invested in the bank’s debt—a miraculous option that, translated, meant salvation for the group. All it required was paying a commission to Márquez to turn that dream into reality.
Though some executives involved in meetings with José Trinidad Márquez (a.k.a. Domingo Galán Macías) noticed with bewilderment that the Venezuelan intermediary displayed little interest when presented with technical information, they granted credibility to his dealings. After all, Venezuela had proven to be a paradise of corruption during the five-year period in which Espírito Santo thrived, and where anything could happen. On April 11, 2014, buoyed by the imminent liquidity injection, they approved an increase in the debt limit, just as Salgado wished. On April 30, to nurture that joy, Márquez, using a Hotmail account, sent them a forged record of an extraordinary assembly—imagined—of Pdvsa in which the allocation of the fund to the BES for a period of six years was approved, in fierce competition “against other bids presented by banking entities like UBS (Zurich), BSI (Geneva), and MITSUBISHI (UFJ) Tokyo (Geneva).” However, there was no need to wait long for the Portuguese to be disabused, not only because the money never materialized, but because three months later, the bank was intervened.
Instead, as the prosecution document recounts, Ricardo Salgado “having accomplished his objectives with the scheme set-up (…) made efforts to pay the promised rewards to José Trinidad Márquez.” He arranged for 4.5 million dollars to be transferred to Márquez’s accounts at BSI in Switzerland and Santander in Spain, as well as to a corporate account opened at BES Luxembourg in the name of Boddickron Overseas S.A., a company incorporated ad hoc in Panama with Domingo Galán Macías as the beneficiary.
In Spain, José Trinidad Márquez and his partner, Katilin Miguelina Mijares, are being investigated in relation to an inquiry opened in Portugal in which it was detected how elements from the government of Banco Espírito Santo (BES) managed to obtain new forms of financing from public entities in Venezuela, which were practically insolvent.
One form of financing was the hiring of an entity from the aforementioned banking group, ESAF, for the management of pension funds from Venezuelan public entities, mandated so that these funds could invest in the share capital of the main holding of the Espírito Santo Group, up to a maximum of 700 million euros, explains the National Court judge María Tardón.
In exchange for this hiring, commissions were paid to people connected with Venezuelan public companies and to intermediaries. Thus, the judge stated in 2021, “the payment of a commission of 2.9 million euros to Trinidad, who used the identity of Domingo Galán Macías for this entire operation, would be corroborated.”
Under that name, he received influxes from BES and illicit sources into bank accounts opened in Switzerland and Spain, which he supposedly allocated for the purchase of two properties equally with Katilin Mijares in Alicante.
