In addition to the earlier publication regarding Burford Capital and Wilmer Ruperti, the affidavit from Benjamin Patrick Ogden contains some intriguing details about Ruperti’s web of connections. Since most of the information in this affidavit comes from a disgruntled employee of Ruperti, it deserves the type of scrutiny that this site regularly provides. The cast of characters who managed to evade Hall’s reach is, to put it mildly, some of the worst scum from Venezuela.
Let me start with the email at the top of the affidavit. Below, Patrick Mooney sends communication to Dan Sargeant, part of a lawsuit against Ruperti, and Andrew Preston from Clyde & Co, legal advisor to Sargeant. The email relates to a case filed in the UK by Novoship (Sovcomflot) of Russia against Ruperti. (The highlighted sections were added as shown in the original documents downloaded from PACER).
A simple search for Preston’s employer, Clyde & Co, leads to Wikipedia, which states that Clyde is a law firm established quite some time ago, with Lloyds as a major client. Refer to the email from Preston below, directed to Daniel Hall from Burford and one of the Sargeants. The heads of Clyde & Co will surely appreciate Preston’s discretion regarding one of the firm’s oldest clients.
Beyond the incredibly conflicted UK lawyers and investigators, moving on to paragraph 62 of the affidavit reveals interesting elements for Venezuela watchers. I won’t comment that Hall’s secret sauce is, um, Google or paying for information. Longhurst was fired by Ruperti in early 2012, but he agreed to sell information to Hall’s Russian clients around August 2014.
Readers of this site will surely remember last year’s scandal involving Goldman Sachs’s payment of $865 million for $2.8 billion in Venezuela’s “hunger bonds.” The WSJ uncovered the brokerage firm that negotiated the bonds with Goldman: Dinosaur. I am absolutely certain that the Venezuelan Central Bank’s choice of a firm – which happens to handle Ruperti’s affairs – to sell bonds to Goldman for 30 cents on the dollar is purely coincidence.
What about Ávila? There is a firm with the exact name linked to Víctor Gill, a totally corrupt “banker” whose daughter María Graciela is married to Luis Oberto. Oberto’s father is the O in BBO Financial Services, another company that has been doing good business with Ruperti for over a decade. According to FINRA disclosures, Ávila was found to have “facilitated the sale of over $2.5 billion in Venezuelan bonds for clients without having adequate anti-money laundering (AML) procedures in place.”
Ludovico Fontana, the CFO of Ruperti’s Maroil, is mentioned as the predecessor of Longhurst.
German Rivero Zerpa is described as Ruperti’s personal banker and founder of Ávila. FINRA banned Rivero Zerpa from “associating with any FINRA member in any capacity” at the end of 2014. Yet, Rivero Zerpa has pedigree, as his Bloomberg profile states he has managed a “client portfolio worth $3.2 billion, executing sovereign debt fixed-income transactions, trading OTC options on sovereign bonds, as well as structuring and negotiating credit-linked notes.” He is a former partner of Juan Domingo Cordero, who is in turn a partner of Raúl Gorrín and Gustavo Perdomo. He is currently affiliated with a team called Helvetica in California, and a handful of UK shells in partnership with Julio Herrera Velutini.
Ruperti works with the best in the business, of course. Banks like Espirito Santo and Compagnie Bancaire Helvetique, well-versed in Venezuelan corruption. According to Ogden’s affidavit, Ruperti also used trading houses in Caracas (most of which have disappeared) linked to Franklin Duran, Carlos Kaufman, and Albert Darwiche, who comes from BBO (Oberto Sr) and Unovalores (Oberto Jr).
Ogden’s affidavit serves as evidence that even the “best” investigators in the world have only a fraction of an idea about who is who in Venezuela’s corruption leagues. Having dealt with and exposed those held by the boliburguesía in the United States such as Fusion GPS, I believe I need to focus a bit more on their UK counterparts, to further unravel the corruption tied to Venezuela in Londongrad. To be continued…