London – The network of connections surrounding ACU President Al Cárdenas with associates of Hugo Chávez dates back years and involves the defense of individuals linked to fraud, theft, and money laundering. Two days ago, before I published an article revealing further connections between Cárdenas and some of Venezuela’s most corrupt oligarchs, I emailed both Cárdenas and his public relations contact at ACU (Laura Rigas) for comments. Both read my emails but chose not to respond. As a blogger aiming for objective reporting, I felt it was necessary to give them a chance to clarify their professional ties with the men behind Derwick Associates. I then sent a request for comments to Joseph DeMaria, an attorney at Tew Cardenas, who represents Pedro Trebbau-López and Alejandro Betancourt-López in the $300 million lawsuit against the Banco Venezolano de Crédito, as well as Oscar García Mendoza from the free-market think tank CEDICE-Libertad, and Rafael Alfonso.
DeMaria responded, stating:
Mr. Boyd. I will refer to the public record.
I, not Mr. Cárdenas, am the attorney hired as litigation counsel for Mr. Betancourt and Mr. Trebbau. My firm has never represented Derwick in this litigation. When hired earlier this year, I was engaged to represent these two individuals. That is the basis for my involvement in this case.
Furthermore, despite your constant reference to Mr. Cárdenas in relation to this litigation, he does not provide any litigation services in this matter. The litigation is handled exclusively by me and my litigation team.
I hope this clarifies any confusion you may have had about how this litigation is being managed.
So, I’m corrected. Mr. Cárdenas’s firm does not represent Derwick Associates, but rather the two owners of Derwick Associates listed: the newly minted billionaires, Mr. Trebbau-Lopez and Betancourt-Lopez. Cárdenas’s firm represents the owners of Derwick Associates, not Derwick Associates itself.
The Tew Cardenas law firm comprises 23 attorneys in total. It is not a firm of 500 lawyers; it is a boutique. Cárdenas is the founder and director of Tew Cardenas. Mr. DeMaria’s assertion that Mr. Cárdenas has nothing to do with Derwick Associates and/or its principals strictly in terms of litigation could be correct. But how many of the firm’s clients does he actually represent? He’s the rainmaker and top seller. Who secured the contract, Mr. DeMaria? My sources in Venezuela claim that Cárdenas himself made the sale, that he was fully aware of Derwick’s fortune’s origins and saw an opportunity to profit from fees and potentially secure a lobbying contract. Can Cárdenas say he has never met anyone from Derwick Associates? In fact, the choice of location in Florida by the Derwick guys—a strange choice considering the anti-Chávez sentiment of any Florida jury—had much to do with the phrase reportedly used by Cárdenas during the pitch: “I don’t lose cases in my own backyard.”
But let’s talk about a different white-collar criminal from Chávez’s circle: Ricardo Fernández Barrueco, another billionaire oligarch who went from parking cars as a valet to becoming a major contractor and money launderer for Chávez. He is another Venezuelan previously represented by Tew Cardenas in a dispute with the Drug Enforcement Agency. DeMaria was then Barrueco’s attorney. So again, is this another individual unknown to Cárdenas? Can anyone seriously believe DeMaria’s argument that Cárdenas, founder and director of Tew Cardenas, is completely unaware and detached from what his junior partners are doing in representation of his law firm? DeMaria’s argument contradicts photographic sessions where the ACU President appears quite friendly with this criminal (see image). But it doesn’t stop there. On the same evening Cárdenas was posing for photos with Fernández Barrueco, top dogs from FTI Consulting were also present –Neal Hochberg, Matias Mora Simoes, Jack Dunn IV, Frank Holder, and Erik Miller– suggesting that both Cárdenas and FTI Consulting have been scoring substantial business contracts from Venezuela’s worst for several years. And guess who the Derwick guys hired for their “image consulting”? You guessed it: FTI Consulting.
But why stop there? Tew Cardenas currently represents none other than David Osio from Davos International Bank. This is a familiar name when discussing corruption and fraud associated with Chávez’s government. And once again, it turns out that Mr. DeMaria has been hired as legal counsel for David Osio in a lawsuit initiated by former partners Rodrigo Fernández and Andrés Sotillo. Is DeMaria going to argue now that Cárdenas has nothing to do with this either? Venezuelan financial bloggers have previously claimed that Osio was FTI Consulting’s “representative” in Caracas, so some context is needed for those unfamiliar with the “banker” David Osio.
David Osío.
David Osio is one of the few financial operators who have defrauded the Venezuelan people out of hundreds of millions. He was involved in the Ponzi scheme set up by Francisco Illarramendi, where roughly $550 million in pension money belonging to Venezuela’s oil workers disappeared (with the help of Osio’s banks). In that particular case, Moris Beracha, another former FTI Consulting client, bribed a PDVSA official using Osio’s financial network. But that’s not Osio’s only financial misstep. His tenure at Banco Latino International during Venezuela’s banking crisis in the 1990s raised questions, as did his actions at Global Bank and Dollar Savings Bank, leading the Office of Thrift Supervision to declare his activities illegal. In partnership with others, he forged documents to divert “substantial amounts” of money from Enrique Delfino—whose heirs, expecting the funds to be part of their inheritance, realized the entrusted funds had disappeared and took him to court. Osio helped Gonzalo Tirado secure Chavista clients for Allen Stanford’s Ponzi scheme. He has also been involved in countless illegal transactions to assist PDVSA officials, Chavista ministers, and members of the boliburguesía—Derwick Associates supposedly among them—in diverting and laundering billions. For such operations, Osio is believed to have earned millions in commissions and allegedly used Goldman Sachs, Bank Bauer, JP Morgan, UBS, CF Monaco, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and other financial institutions as part of his laundering operation. Osio seems to have had issues in Switzerland relating to his operations with D Société Financière Suisse S.A., another vehicle he used to move millions from PDVSA. He used to operate out of Miami with Mauro Nannini, but due to the lawsuit filed by Tew Cardenas, he decided to close up and relocate to New York City, where Andrés Coles safeguards his interests. Osio’s financial network spans Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, Portugal, the U.S., Switzerland, Antigua and Barbuda, and even New Zealand. Fernández and Sotillo, his former partners, claim Osio even used his own mother to allegedly perpetrate a multimillion-dollar fraud.
There is enough material here for a book on corruption in Venezuela, one of Hugo Chávez’s legacies we will have to contend with for years to come. I publish this as yet another example of the type of Venezuelan clients Tew Cardenas regularly takes on. I risk sounding like a broken record here, but U.S. authorities would do well to investigate David Osio’s activities, his connections with FTI Consulting and Tew Cardenas, and how Venezuelan criminals such as Fernández Barrueco, Beracha, Trebbau-López, Betancourt-López, and Osio are exploiting the system, with FTI and Cárdenas’s assistance, using trade flows and financial markets to launder their ill-gotten fortunes. Despite what Mr. DeMaria says, Al Cárdenas seems to be neck-deep in all of this. It is his prerogative to do so, of course, but the moral standing of his public persona as a leader of ACU-GOP is unsustainable.