In this story, dates are crucial. They explain the steps taken by former Corporate Manager of Loss Prevention and Control at the state-owned Pdvsa, Rafael Ernesto Reiter Muñoz, when his bureaucratic patron and former president of the oil company, Rafael Ramírez, was ousted by Nicolás Maduro. With the same secrecy he maintained for years, Reiter prepared for his retirement through a complex financial scheme that originated in Venezuela and reached the remote Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Before even turning 40, and as if it were an early retirement plan, Rafael Reiter and his associates devised a scheme to ensure that a Venezuelan company, a contractor of Pdvsa where Reiter worked, would funnel its income worldwide through various offshore companies, known in financial lingo as offshore. This is revealed in the Pandora Papers, the massive leak of over 11.9 million documents from 14 offshore service providers based in tax havens, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with more than 600 journalists from 150 news outlets in 117 countries, including Armando.info.
Rafael Reiter’s career as Loss Prevention and Control Manager at Pdvsa began in 2005. His background as a bouncer at a nightclub in Las Mercedes, the nightlife district of Caracas, wasn’t sufficient credential for such a responsibility in what was then the largest company in South America. But the connections and endorsement from his mother, Marla Muñoz Olivo, a leftist activist who served as secretary to Nicolás Maduro in the National Assembly, sufficed. According to Social Security records, she still works in the Venezuelan parliament, having also assisted Rafael Ramírez both at the Ministry of Oil and in the Foreign Ministry.
From the shadows of financial power in a country awash with petrodollars, Rafael Reiter cultivated privileges and relationships over the almost ten years he held that strategic position. He mostly went unnoticed until in 2017, he became definitively linked to massive corruption cases within Pdvsa, which were exposed in judicial investigations across multiple countries.
In August of 2017, for example, he was named in a court in Houston, Texas, in the same case that implicated former Venezuelan officials like Nervis Villalobos, César Rincón, and Alejandro Istúriz, for collecting bribes in exchange for favoring Pdvsa payments and contracts to the Zulia entrepreneurs Roberto Rincón and Abraham Shiera, who pled guilty to U.S. authorities. Following this case, he was requested for extradition and detained in Spain in October of that same year.
Before that, Reiter had been mentioned in connection with the notorious case involving the suitcase of 800,000 dollars that Guido Antonini Wilson brought from Caracas to Buenos Aires in 2007 for the presidential campaign of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, illustrating the type of compromised and covert actions he undertook not only for his corporate boss but also for the Hugo Chávez government. In July 2014, he was one of the few officials who had the dubious honor of meeting the former director of military intelligence, Hugo El Pollo Carvajal, as he landed in Venezuela after a brief detention in Aruba, an island nation fulfilling a request from the United States. Just a few months later, when the downfall of the all-powerful Rafael Ramírez seemed inevitable, Reiter transitioned into a businessman.
In September 2014, Maduro undermined Ramírez’s power by removing him from the oil sector and appointing him, first, as Minister of Foreign Relations and, three months later, in December, as Venezuela’s permanent representative to the United Nations (UN) in New York, a halfway point before his current exile in Italy.
In between these appointments, in October 2014, Rafael Reiter registered a company in Panama named Inversiones RC 58 Inc alongside one of the favored financiers of the chavismo, the Frenchman Charles Henry Du Bosq De Beaumont, and Said Aurelio Cabrera Abraham, a former army officer and owner of Plymouth Overseas Limited in Venezuela and Panama, a company that sold security systems to Pdvsa. Months later, in December of that year, Reiter founded Consultores Grupo RT in Caracas, dedicated precisely to locating people, data, and goods, information protection, satellite location of vehicles, GPS system installation, vehicle armoring, and renting armored cars, among other services.
In the following months until the first half of 2015, just before purchasing a house in Barcelona, Spain, for 1.15 million euros, Reiter constructed the sophisticated financial structure that is now unveiled by the Pandora Papers.
Offshores are forever
A letter dated December 12, 2014, addressed to the Asiaciti Trust law firm, one of the 14 sources for the Pandora Papers leak, marked the starting point of Rafael Reiter’s offshore plans. That letter was signed by Venezuelan lawyer Alexis Hurtado Saravia and vouched for the honesty and “proper conduct” of Reiter and those who would ultimately become his partners: Cristian Figueroa Sans, Fernando Figueroa Sans, and Fernando Taranto Núñez.
Shortly afterward, the Panamanian branch of Asiaciti Trust – whose main office is in Hong Kong – formalized the financial structure. Within months, Reiter, Fernando Taranto, and Cristian Figueroa became owners of Uniplexon Group Ltd, in Barbados, a northeastern Caribbean island. That company ended up acquiring Corporación IESV, a contractor of Pdvsa since 2014, while being controlled by Septra Foundation, a trust registered in the Cook Islands – an archipelago in the South Pacific – where Reiter and Figueroa each own 40%, with the remaining 20% belonging to Taranto.
Corporación IESV was created in September 2013, based in Maturín, Monagas state, a petroleum hub in eastern Venezuela. From the start, Cristian Figueroa was the main shareholder. Just one year later, in September 2014, the company secured a direct-contract agreement with Pdvsa for “service to wells with continuous tubing unit” in the “eastern region of Pdvsa Servicios Petroleros S.A.” Documents reveal that the initial contract offered the company fees of 3.6 million dollars and another 6.3 million bolivars, equivalent to 120,000 dollars at the Sicad II exchange rate at that time.
Rafael Reiter was still an employee of Pdvsa and did not appear as a partner of Corporación IESV, but the documents contained in the Pandora Papers leave no doubt about his connection to the company. From the start, the offshore architecture was centered around the business of that Pdvsa contractor. Another letter dated April 9, 2015, stated that once the company in Barbados and the trust in the Cook Islands were created, “eventually, Mr. Cristian Figueroa will transfer all the shares” of Corporación IESV. This transfer in favor of Uniplexon Group Ltd, the company registered in Barbados, was finally completed in February 2017.
This maneuver then turned Rafael Reiter into a beneficiary of the businesses of the Pdvsa contractor, while Corporación IESV remained protected by the bilateral investment protection agreement signed between Barbados and Venezuela, serving as a shield against any expropriation or government actions against the company.
Besides the 2014 contract, Corporación IESV secured additional agreements with the oil company between 2015 and 2018, according to the National Register of Contractors (RNC) and a catalog available on the company’s website. “Five continuous years of operations with our main client Pdvsa S.A,” states a brochure, which also details activities carried out for “cleaning and stimulation service of wells” in the eastern part of the country.
Neither representatives of the company nor Cristian Figueroa responded to interview requests. Attempts were also made to contact Fernando Taranto, but he could not be located; at one of his home and office addresses in Caracas, it was reported that he has been living in Spain for several years. “I have relayed the questions to my client and we will analyze the opportunity and viability of responding, given that there are judicial procedures pending,” replied Rafael Reiter’s lawyer in Spain, Nelson De Souza Vilela. As this report was being finalized, no responses had been received.
Simultaneously with that corporate structure, Rafael Reiter also prepared a similar scheme to protect family assets. Another trust in the Cook Islands, named Lantag Foundation, registered on February 18, 2015, with the purpose of “protecting assets and succession planning,” ended up controlling all shares of Wegyn Financial Corp, which was created weeks earlier in the British Virgin Islands.
According to the documents from the Pandora Papers, the goal of Wegyn Financial Corp was to “open an investment account in Panama” with funds of “business origin” from the management of “industrial machinery for cleaning oil wells in Venezuela.” Besides Reiter, his wife, Vanesa Carolina Yssea, who was also detained in Spain at the time and holds at least three companies in that country, is listed as a beneficiary of the Lantag Foundation trust.
Reiter’s partners also replicated this offshore asset protection scheme where a trust in the Cook Islands owns a company in the British Virgin Islands whose funds derive from the oil well cleaning activity in Venezuela, the same work that Pdvsa contracted with Corporación IESV since 2014.
Movie Investor
While the revealed documents continue to insist on the oil business to explain the origin of his fortune, questions about how Rafael Reiter obtained funds are contained within the judicial files held by authorities in the United States, Spain, and Portugal against him. The accusation from the Southern District Court of Texas in Houston, from August 2017, is a compendium of the irregular maneuvers that Reiter benefited from while shadowed by Rafael Ramírez for years.
Specifically in Reiter’s case, the court detailed that between 2012 and 2013, he received at least three bank transfers totaling 580,000 dollars into a family member’s bank account; and additionally, he received luxurious gifts from businessmen Roberto Rincón and Abraham Shiera, such as two armored cars valued at 107,500 dollars each, a 10,300 dollar bag for a family member, coverage of a luxury hotel vacation in Aruba in June 2013, and a condominium in the Four Seasons hotel complex on Brickell Avenue in Miami, for which a payment of 867,619 dollars was made. The accusation also mentions that Reiter instructed Rincón to invest 1.5 million dollars in his name for the production of a film.
Upon their detention in Spain in October 2017, Reiter and his wife justified the purchase of their luxurious home in Barcelona through resources they had in bank accounts in Italy and Florida, said to be from the “alleged sale of a property in Miami for 4,350,000” dollars, according to the case file cited by the Spanish electronic media Okdiario.
After spending eight months in detention in Spain, Reiter was released on probation but must report to the court once a month. There remains a request for his extradition to the United States, which was agreed upon by the full Criminal Chamber of the National Court, but Spanish authorities decided to postpone the proceedings until he is tried in the ongoing investigation in Spain regarding money laundering from Pdvsa’s corruption schemes, which involves other former officials like Nervis Villalobos or Javier Alvarado, among others.
The National Court of Spain approved Reiter’s extradition to the United States, but first, he must face justice in that country regarding money laundering, also originating from Pdvsa. Credit: Gabriel Bouys / AFP.
On top of that, Rafael Reiter’s name is also part of the Portuguese justice investigation concerning the collapsed Banco Espírito Santo (BES) and the funds that companies like Pdvsa funneled through that financial institution in exchange for bribes paid to officials who decided on deposits. The names of businessmen Roberto Rincón and Abraham Shiera reappear as responsible for paying bribes using bank accounts. “In February 2013, Rafael Reiter, as director of internal security services at Pdvsa, overseeing the compliance of contracts with Bariven’s suppliers, received USD $500,000 in the account of Safeleader in the ESBD,” reads one of the many pieces of the extensive file.
Safeleader Investments Ltd is a company registered in the British Virgin Islands by the Panamanian law firm Alcogal, another entity involved in the Pandora Papers. The Portuguese Prosecutor’s office file details that it was established by Paulo Murta, a former executive of BES, but falsely attributed to Samark López Bello, who is considered by the United States as the frontman for Tareck El Aissami.
At 43 years old, Rafael Reiter awaits proceedings in Spain, perhaps with the same secrecy that he operated under for a decade at Pdvsa, anticipating the court’s decision in that country and his potential extradition to the United States. From his time in power, he still possesses a string of offshore companies he established just as his protector, Rafael Ramírez, was facing inevitable downfall.
(*) José María Irujo from the Madrid newspaper ‘El País’ contributed to this story from Spain.
