The man parked the vehicle, turned off the engine, and stared at the bicolor building with circular lines and large windows, surrounded by palm trees. It appeared quite welcoming. He hesitated between getting out or not. A phrase had been circling in his mind for several weeks: “…the day will come when we will all be locked up; they will lock us up…”.
Gois, one of the members of the network trying to distribute 560 million dollars among participants involved in a dark and illicit operation with Pdvsa, had told him these words.
He took a deep breath, got out of the car, and headed to the offices of Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) in Miami. For Pedro Binaggia, there was no turning back.
The following is the account (with some narrative license) made by Pedro Binaggia—an Italian-Venezuelan financial operator living in Panama—to HSI Florida, which is reflected in the U.S. indictment against Francisco Convit Guruceaga dated July 24, 2018. This indictment involved collaboration from agencies and police forces from Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Malta.
In the official document, Binaggia states that he was contacted in late 2014 by Convit (partner of Alejandro Betancourt, Orlando Alvarado—son of Javier Alvarado, former president of Bariven—and Pedro Trebbau at Derwick Associates) and Carmelo Urdaneta, legal consultant for the Ministry of Oil of Venezuela, to carry out a supposed currency exchange operation in which they claimed to offer him 100 million dollars at a favorable rate.
However, they took a long time to send the foreign exchange sales contract to formalize the agreement. Initially, this didn’t worry Binaggia, as he was told the funds would come from a duly regulated European financial entity. His objective was to offer the dollars to his clients in Venezuela.
Thus, Binaggia asked Convit to transfer part of the funds to a trust of which Binaggia was the final beneficiary. Convit completed the operation and reported that the funds would arrive in euros and not in dollars.
By mid-February 2015, Binaggia had already received about 78 million euros in various transfers and was supposedly still asking Convit to send the forex contract between his trust and Portmann Capital Management Ltd., which turned out to be the financial wing of a company registered in Madrid: Columbus One Properties SL.
All evidence pointed towards that amount being the bribe payments that Convit and his Derwick partners owed to officials Urdaneta and Abraham E. Ortega, Director of Finance at Pdvsa, who facilitated the operation.
Finally, Convit sent a plainly forged document: a fake joint venture contract for 600 million dollars between Eaton Global Services Limited, a shell company registered in Hong Kong owned by Raúl Gorrín Belisario—close associate of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores—and Binaggia’s trust. The supposed business of the joint venture was granting loans in bolívares to PDVSA.
Binaggia informed Convit that the fraudulent agreement could not be used and that he needed the original underlying swap contracts. Days later in Venezuela, Urdaneta delivered the documents to Binaggia and explained that he had obtained them from the PDVSA official identified in the indictment as Conspirator 1, likely Alvaro Ledo Nass, PDVSA’s legal consultant.
The documents Binaggia handed over to HSI-Miami revealed the source of the Pdvsa funds and the nature of the scheme.
The collection of documents consisted of three pieces: a loan contract in bolívares payable in dollars between Pdvsa and Rantor Capital CA—a shell company of Raúl Gorrín registered in Anzoátegui—for an amount of 7.2 billion bolívares; a subsequent contract between Rantor and Eaton Global in which the former assigned creditor rights from Pdvsa to the latter, and a letter from Eaton Global to Pdvsa, specifically to Víctor Aular Blanco, Vice President of Finance, informing about the exchange and requesting that the payment be made in euros (ironically, they had no accounts in bolívares) and transferred to Portmann Capital Management Ltd., a financial entity registered in Malta, owned by the Swiss Kurt and Yves Portmann, on behalf of Eaton Global.
In summary, Raúl Gorrín assumed the obligation to pay PDVSA about 7.2 billion bolívares (valued at 35 million euros) and received 510 million euros in return.
The U.S. indictment qualifies this operation as a “naive attempt” to cover what was clearly “misappropriation of funds.”
It became evident that it was not just a currency transaction, but a money laundering operation expecting Binaggia to cleanse the proceeds from Pdvsa’s embezzlement and make bribery payments to the officials who facilitated it.
The risks were high, and Binaggia knew this because he had previously participated in similar schemes with foreign exchange differential dealings in operations with the Treasury and even with Pdvsa, in the case of the contract with Atlantic 17107 Administrator and Violet Advisors SA of the brothers Luis and Ignacio Oberto Anselmi. Rumors were circulating that U.S. authorities were investigating him.
From the meeting with the HSI department in Miami in early 2016, Binaggia emerged as a “confidential source” (CS, for its initials in English) that would provide dozens of documents and recordings over the following months for the so-called Money Flight Operation, in which various U.S. and European agencies worked together.
As part of the operation, Binaggia continued working with Convit and José Vicente Amparan, identified in the indictment as a professional money launderer.
Thus, Binaggia made cash payments in Venezuela ordered by Urdaneta and Conspirator 1—most likely Álvaro Ledo Nass—to themselves and to Aular, who received one million euros in cash.
In total, Binaggia executed transfers worth about 15 million euros during the summer of 2015, including various electronic dollar transactions ordered by Convit and Urdaneta, until he began to resist making more payments, using his trust liquidation as an excuse. Binaggia argued that he could not proceed without the promised foreign exchange contract, which banks were requesting for compliance reasons.
Convit and Urdaneta continued pressing Binaggia to make the ordered transfers. Ultimately, they forced Binaggia to a meeting in Convit’s office in Caracas. This was when the infamous encounter occurred in which Convit, with a gun on his desk, held the remote control for a German Shepherd’s collar and intimidated Binaggia by saying, “I can’t always control it.”
During this meeting, Amparan told Binaggia that the false joint venture contract had already been presented to the banks working with Portmann Capital Management Ltd. in Canada and Malta, and it would be impossible to replace it with a simple exchange contract. He explained that, in any case, additional fake contracts would be needed. At this point, Binaggia claimed he requested to return the Pdvsa funds and reverse the transactions—a matter that, obviously, was impossible.
In the following weeks, the group’s activities focused on replacing the false joint venture contract with another “better,” also fake, to justify the initial transfers to Binaggia, while efforts continued to finalize the agreed bribery payments to Urdaneta and Ortega.
In the recordings made by Binaggia, group members explicitly acknowledged that what they were involved in was a money laundering operation and illicit enrichment.
Throughout the months, as the operation stalled, Gorrín and Ortega brought in other international financial operators like Matthias Krull, a banker from a Swiss financial institution, and Gustavo Hernández Frieri, a Colombian by birth and naturalized U.S. citizen, described in the indictment as a “professional money launderer.”
Binaggia continued operating with Urdaneta, Ortega, and Conspirator 1—likely Alvaro Ledo Nass—trying to distribute Pdvsa funds among themselves and other members of the scheme based on the additional false contracts offered by Amparan.
From a recording of a meeting in Madrid in March 2017, discussing the use of false bonds in the scheme, the operators’ concern about ensuring their share of the loot reached Cilia Flores’ children—Maduro’s stepchildren, Walter, Yoswal, and Yosser Gavidia Flores—became clear.
The meeting took place at the Columbus One Properties SL headquarters, owned by Ralph Steinmann, Luis Fernando Vuteff García, Amparan, and Darío Ale. The group’s financial transactions were carried out through Portmann Capital Management Ltd.
At several moments in the conversation, Urdaneta and Binaggia referred to the need to pay a portion of the operation’s profits (159 million euros) to members of the Venezuelan regime, which they variously referred to as “the boys,” “the lady’s kids,” “the chamos,” or “Cilia’s acquaintances.”
On December 15, 2014, Víctor Aular, vice president of Finance at Pdvsa, received instructions from the Executive Committee to sign a loan contract in bolívares payable in dollars with a company belonging to Raúl Gorrín. Two days later, on December 17, Aular signed on behalf of PDVSA a contract with Rantor Capital CA for the amount of 7.2 billion bolívares. This was a contract similar to one signed in March 2012 by the same Aular on behalf of PDVSA with Atlantic 17107 Administrator, which was denounced this month as illegal by Tarek El Aissami in front of Maduro’s regime’s prosecutor’s office.
At that time, the official exchange rate between the bolívar and the dollar was 6.30, so the 7.2 billion bolívares equated to 1.143 billion dollars. However, in the parallel market, the rate was 182.23 bolívares per dollar, meaning Rantor (Raúl Gorrín) only needed to change less than 40 million dollars in the black market to obtain the 7.2 billion bolívares he had to lend to PDVSA. The remaining difference of about 560 million dollars constituted the profit from the exchange differential that was shared among Raúl Gorrín, Cilia Flores’ children, Maduro’s stepchildren, the Derwick group, high-ranking officials from the oil company and the Ministry of Oil, advisors, bankers, and financial operators.
This wasn’t the only operation conducted by Convit, his Derwick partners, and Raúl Gorrín with Pdvsa funds.
In May 2015, when Cilia Flores’ nephew, Erik Malpica Flores—now a strongman of Miraflores—was in charge of Pdvsa’s finances, the scheme had doubled that amount to 1.2 billion dollars through an extension of the 2014 contract. Pdvsa sources indicate that the group repeated similar operations almost a dozen times.
Gorrín turned to his banker, Matthias Krull, to launder the “earnings” from this second operation and distribute the corresponding share to other members of the scheme: about 600 million dollars, deposited by PDVSA in Gazprombank.
In October 2016, Krull met with Binaggia in Panama and explained that he was looking for a bank to deposit the funds from a currency exchange operation between his client—Gorrín—and Pdvsa. Binaggia responded that he could explore some options but that he needed the contractual justification of the origins of the funds. A few days later, Krull sent the requested document. This was an amendment to the original contract between Pdvsa and Rantor, doubling the credit line from 7.2 billion to 14 billion bolívares. The amendment was dated May 25, 2015, and specifically incorporated the initial loan contract.
Among the subsequent communications, Krull sent Binaggia an email with copies of Gorrín’s and Mario Bonilla Valera’s passports, a close friend and frontman for Cilia Flores’ children.
After several meetings, both in Miami and Panama, to clarify the route and manner of transferring the funds, and according to an attached table in an email obtained by U.S. authorities, the 600 million dollars were distributed as follows:
A sheet titled “Detailed Income from PDVSA” shows ten transfers from PDVSA from December 29, 2014, to February 3, 2015, amounting to 511,913,270 euros.
Another worksheet titled “Operation Summary 600k” shows that of the 511 million euros:
20,476,530.83 euros were allocated to Portmann Capital Management Ltd., corresponding to a 4% fee. Subsequently, the company would be fined by the Maltese financial authority in August 2018 after the charge against Convit became known.
227,265,537.52 euros went to “Boli” (Convit and Betancourt), of which they transferred 78.8 million euros to Binaggia (the trigger of the Money Flight Operation) and the rest, around 148.5 million euros, to themselves through shell companies Volbor Vontobel and Explotación Vencon.
159,085,876.26 euros were allocated to “the chamos” (Cilia Flores’ children, Maduro’s stepchildren).
68,179,661.26 euros went to Raúl Gorrín, who made dozens of dollar transfers through banks in Malta and Austria, including payments for services on yachts and jets in Miami, Florida.
The remaining 36,905,664.87 euros were accounted for as the cost of the initial 7.2 billion bolívares used to acquire the 511 million euros.
Pdvsa sources indicate that Gorrín and his Derwick partners may have conducted at least nine similar operations.
Four years after the U.S. indictment against Francisco Convit, the officials, intermediaries, and financial operators of the scheme are either imprisoned or on the run.
Francisco Convit is currently in Venezuela and unable to leave due to a U.S. arrest warrant and under the watchful eyes of the regime, which fears he could provide information, as has happened with other members of the scheme.
Meanwhile, Alejandro Betancourt was charged this month by the regime’s prosecutor—within the framework of the process against Rafael Ramírez—for several cases of corruption within Pdvsa, including one related to the Oberto brothers (Atlantic 17170 Administrator), as a result of which a house in the Caracas Country Club and a helicopter were confiscated from him. Betancourt’s business dealings with PetroZamora (Zulia) are also reportedly under review.
Raúl Gorrín has been on the U.S. most-wanted list since 2019 in relation to the case of former national treasurer Alejandro Andrade, sentenced to 10 years in prison, who confessed to receiving 1 billion dollars from Gorrín as bribes to facilitate operations like those described here during Andrade’s and Claudia Díaz Guillén’s tenures, who is currently facing charges in a U.S. court. Gorrín, who is in Venezuela under the protection of the regime—for now—is also being investigated in connection with the Money Flight Operation.
Matthias Krull, the German banker, raised in Venezuela, residing in Panama, and a high executive at Julius Baer, was arrested in 2018 at Miami airport. After pleading guilty, he became a “star witness” who recruited other Swiss bankers as prosecution witnesses. In exchange for his cooperation, in 2020 a judge reduced his original ten-year sentence to three and a half years. In his testimony to authorities, Krull admitted, among other things, to participating in a meeting in Raúl Gorrín’s office in Caracas where he met Cilia Flores’ three children—Maduro’s stepchildren—who received nearly 200 million dollars from the irregular currency scheme with Pdvsa orchestrated by Gorrín and the bolichicos.
Gustavo Hernandez Frieri was arrested in Sicily, Italy, in July 2018, just days after the charges against Convit became public, from where he was extradited to the U.S. In 2021, a federal judge sentenced him to four years in prison after he pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2019. In April 2022, a Florida court confiscated the mansion that served as residence for Hernández Frieri and his family in Miami, which was valued at nearly 5 million dollars.
Abraham Ortega surrendered to U.S. authorities in 2018 and pleaded guilty. In May 2021, he was sentenced to two years and four months in prison after admitting to receiving over 12 million dollars in bribes that were transferred to U.S. financial institutions. Ortega received a significant reduction in his sentence—previously five years—for being the first Venezuelan official to cooperate with U.S. federal authorities in the case.
Carmelo Urdaneta turned himself in Miami in August 2020 to face charges of money laundering and corruption. He was released on a 1.5 million dollar bail. In July 2021, he reached an agreement with the prosecution and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money. In 2022, he was sentenced to four years in prison. For his cooperation, Urdaneta was charged only for one of the offenses. However, he was fined 35,000 dollars and had 49 million dollars worth of assets seized, including a 5.3 million dollar apartment in Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, along with two apartments in Miami Beach and funds from a bank account in Switzerland.
However, not all former Pdvsa officials turned themselves in to collaborate and try to reduce their sentences, confiscations, and fines.
José Vicente Amparan, upon learning that U.S. justice was investigating these matters, fled Spain, where he was living, on a flight to Turkey, from where he returned to Venezuela. Before fleeing, Amparan handed a backpack full of paperwork and a computer to his wife, who left it in a gym locker in central Madrid. Spanish police managed to recover this material to present it to justice in the framework of what is called Operation Carabela.
After being linked to the scheme due to the transfer of almost 200 million dollars from Pdvsa to Cilia Flores’ children—Maduro’s stepchildren—Mario Bonilla was summoned to a hearing on August 16, 2018, in Florida, which he did not attend. For this reason, he was declared a fugitive from U.S. justice. He is believed to be in Caracas.
Luis Fernando Vuteff, a partner of Columbus One Properties, was arrested in Spain in 2018. He was out on bail when he was again arrested in Switzerland in June 2022 and extradited to the U.S. two months later. There is still no word on whether he will plead guilty and collaborate with the authorities or, if by contract, maintain his innocence.
Pedro Binaggia is said to be living in Miami.
The Venezuelan Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, announced at the end of August the detainment of Víctor Aular, who was vice president of Finance at PDVSA. The arrest was part of the complaint made a day earlier by the Oil Minister, Tarek El Aissami, against Rafael Ramírez, who was head of the oil company for over ten years.
The Maduro regime accuses Ramírez of stealing 4.85 billion dollars through “a fraudulent line of credit with which Pdvsa made 28 payments to two funds abroad without receiving any loan.” These events occurred ten years ago.
This refers to the irregular financing contract of Pdvsa with Atlantic 17107 CA from 2012, which, in fact, was first reported exclusively by this medium, Cuentas Claras Digital, in May 2016.
Saab, in response to El Aissami’s complaint, opened an investigation into the case and imposed property and asset securing measures against Juan Andrés Wallis Brandt, head of Atlantic 17107 CA, one of the companies used in the scheme; Víctor Aular Blanco, and financial operators Luis Oberto Anselmi and Ignacio Oberto Anselmi, Rafael Ramírez, and Nervis Villalobos, among others.
The video of Aular’s confession, clearly forced by the regime’s usual intimidation tactics, was not published in full to protect Raúl Gorrín and his partners, including Malpica Flores and Cilia Flores’ children. In it, Aular also detailed the contract between Pdvsa and Gorrín’s companies (Rantor and Eaton Global).
Days after Saab’s hasty accusation, other accusations from the “prosecutor” followed, in which it became evident that the regime intended to sweep the Atlantic matter under the rug.
Finally, if the opaque contract between Pdvsa and Atlantic is illegal, as the regime now claims, what happens to the one between the oil company and Raúl Gorrín’s company, which shares identical characteristics, in which Maduro’s own stepchildren are implicated?
Moreover, if Aular signed both similar contracts, how is it explained that the Attorney General, through prosecutor Farik Karin Mora Salcedo, requested in 2020 the dismissal of the Rantor case (Gorrín), which was approved by Judge Luisa Romero, while in the Atlantic case, they announce criminal actions and keep Aular imprisoned, without addressing the current businesses with the exchange differential conducted by Gorrín and other supposed entrepreneurs close to Erik Malpica Flores?
As we have been stating, the Venezuelan judicial system controlled by the autocrat only acts when it suits Nicolás Maduro’s political interests, although in this case, it seems they have shot themselves in the foot.
What is evident is that if half of what Maduro says about Ramírez and Ramírez about Maduro is true, both should be prosecuted for the looting that Venezuela has suffered and the serious harm caused to all Venezuelans’ patrimony. Confessions reveal the evidence.
Article 271 of the National Constitution states that crimes against public property do not prescribe.