It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Rafael Ramírez, the former Minister of Concurrent Energy and General Director of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), virtually controlled Venezuela’s revenues from 2004 to 2014. During his time at the helm of PDVSA, over $1.2 trillion passed through his hands. Ramírez himself is even documented admitting he supervised transfers between PDVSA and the Venezuelan state worth around $480 billion. These figures are staggering, especially when considering the size of Venezuela, its population, and current state. Ramírez presided over the largest corruption scheme in the world. The term “criminal” hardly begins to cover what Ramírez and his associates did. After Hugo Chávez’s death, Ramírez’s power began to wane, and he was initially nudged into a diplomatic position at the UN and ultimately fired. His entirely corrupt network of collaborators was replaced by another.
As the chief facilitator at @PDVSA, brothers, cousins, personal assistants, closest colleagues, trusted lieutenants, and staff of @RRamirezVE were involved in a globally documented corruption network centered in #Andorra. How has @TheJusticeDept not arrested him yet? pic.twitter.com/OK3dWzfvBo
— alek boyd (@alekboyd) September 18, 2018
However, the pressing question remains: why hasn’t the Justice Department charged, arrested, or sentenced Ramírez? The argument used to be that there was no evidence of wrongdoing, which was not an accurate description considering that nearly all Venezuelan cases processed by the Justice Department have a PDVSA component, ergo Ramírez. Given that PDVSA has been, for many years, the sole source of income, it can be deduced that all the money flowed from PDVSA to the corrupt wherever they were. The myth of the lack of evidence has changed. Dramatically. A recent accusation from Andorra paints an unbearable picture of what the DOJ itself has called the “administrative team.”
This is a criminal group, led by Ramírez, which includes his brothers, cousins, in-laws, personal assistants, closest colleagues, and most trusted lieutenants, all involved in a multimillion-dollar corruption scheme. Fundamentally, Ramírez was the supreme chief, the capo dei capi, the one who approved and supervised the entire structure.
Yet, Ramírez’s corruption didn’t stop in Andorra. His brother-in-law, Baldo Sanso, his wife Beatrice, and his mother-in-law Hildegard Rondon de Sanso have all benefited from Ramírez’s blatant nepotism to the detriment of PDVSA.
Andorra, a small principality nestled between Spain and France, has been investigating this gang for several years. The amounts laundered through one of its banks, Banca Privada D’Andorra (BPA), are greater than Andorra’s GDP. Multiple times over. Sources have told this site that the accumulated evidence exceeds 50,000 pages. Andorran prosecutors took BPA to task and found that the FinCEN alert labeling BPA as a “money laundering concern” was shockingly accurate.
These same sources have sent this site an accusation dated September 13, 2018, revealing possibly unprecedented corruption in history. The Chinese Fund, for instance, is a fund for bribes that PDVSA/Ramírez continually replenished with China as a partner. It was created to finance development and infrastructure in Venezuela, contributing 1/3, leaving the other 2/3 to China. Information about the Chinese Fund was not public, Venezuelans were unaware of how much was there, and nobody could audit it…
Only one of the funds that comprised the “Heavy Fund I” began with $6 billion and was replenished up to $20 billion. Chinese companies, some of which now receive non-bid contracts from Maduro (Shandong Kerui Petroleum), were part of a group of Chinese firms that were promised contracts in Venezuela. The issue was that when the Venezuelan regime withheld payment, Ramírez’s “administrative team” offered to settle invoices in exchange for a percentage of the amounts owed. A monumental racket.
This method was basically applied to every single contractor who “secured” deals from PDVSA or its subsidiaries. The two-pronged corruption strategy was: 1) charge a bribe for obtaining a specific contract, and 2) charge a bribe for payment agreements. Nervis Villalobos, one of Ramírez’s most trusted lieutenants, also charged for generating deals. Offers were not publicly announced. Open calls, in many cases, were never made.
Under the guise of emergency decrees, for example, the goal was to improve Venezuela’s electrical grid, yet there were no public tenders. Therefore, Derwick Associates hired Nervis Villalobos and paid him millions to secure deals. It helped a lot that Javier Alvarado’s son, responsible for overseeing acquisitions at BARIVEN and armed with an annual budget of $7 billion, attended school with the thugs from Derwick.
Insurance was the domain of Diego Salazar Carreño, Ramírez’s cousin. Salazar had his own separate network. When funds belonging to Salazar were frozen following a money-laundering alert triggered by the French government (Salazar “tipped” just under 100,000 euros to a hotel employee in Paris), Andorra froze about 200 million euros spread across many BPA accounts. Not shy about using typical Venezuelan methods, Salazar called Domenic de Villepin to have the former French prime minister sort things out with Andorran authorities. It’s that brazen. The “star judge” from Spain, Baltasar Garzón, also received a call from Salazar, attempting the same with Spanish law enforcement.
Then there are the amounts involved. A myriad of payments flowing back and forth, often internally to avoid compliance checks and red flags, others to money laundering hubs like Portugal and Switzerland, where bankers never saw anything they didn’t like. Banco Espirito Santo is in on it. The usual Swiss suspects too. Hundreds of shell companies were used, many incorporated by BPA Serveis, a BPA subsidiary similar to Mossack-Fonseca. All extraterritorial jurisdictions came into play, from Hong Kong to Belize. Bearer share shells? A favorite flavor of Ramírez and his gang of criminals.
The fact that all this actionable intelligence is available, at a moment when the world is considering what to do to get rid of Chavismo, is a gift that should be utilized and acted upon without delay. Just like the ridiculous case of the PDVSA Litigation Trust. A few days ago, this site proposed a non-military strategy to oust Maduro. Arresting Rafael Ramírez, based on what Andorra has already determined, should be a piece of cake. There are indications that the Justice Department may have reached out to their Andorran counterparts, given the mentions in the accusation regarding investigations being conducted in the U.S., Portugal, Venezuela, Spain, and France. But more could be done, and faster.
Ramírez, who is seeking a spot in Italy with his family, is a free man. He should be brought in, and collaborators already arrested, like Villalobos, Luis Carlos de León, and Rafael Reiter, should receive deals in exchange for more information.