HSI Headquarters in Miami, Florida. Photo: Miami Herald
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 looked almost welcoming. He hesitated between getting out or not. A few words had been echoing in his mind for several weeks: “…the day will come when they will lock us all up; they will lock us up…”.
Those words had come from Gois, one of the network members who had been trying to distribute $560 million among participants in a shadowy and illicit operation involving funds from Pdvsa.
He took a deep breath, got out of the car, and headed toward the offices of the Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) in Miami. For Pedro Binaggia, there was no turning back.
The following is the account (with some narrative liberties) that Pedro Binaggia, an Italian-Venezuelan financial operator residing in Panama, provided to HSI Florida, which is reflected in the US indictment against Francisco Convit Guruceaga dated July 24, 2018. This case involved collaboration from agencies and police bodies in 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 from Derwick Associates) and Carmelo Urdaneta, legal consultant for Venezuela’s Ministry of Petroleum, to conduct a supposed currency exchange operation in which they said they would sell him $100 million at a favorable rate.
However, they delayed in sending the currency purchase agreement (“forex”) to formalize the deal, though this initially did not worry Binaggia, as the funds would come, they told him, from a duly regulated European financial entity. According to Binaggia, his aim 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 ultimate beneficiary. Convit executed the operation and informed that the funds would arrive in euros instead of dollars.
By mid-February 2015, Binaggia had received approximately 78 million euros in several transfers and was reportedly still asking Convit for the forex contract between his trust and Portmann Capital Management Ltd., which would turn out to be the financial arm of a company registered in Madrid: Columbus One Properties SL
Everything pointed to the fact that this amount corresponded to the payment of bribes that Convit and his partners at Derwick were to pay to officials Urdaneta and Abraham E. Ortega, Finance Director of Pdvsa, who had facilitated the operation.
Finally, Convit sent a blatantly forged document: a fake joint venture contract for $600 million between Eaton Global Services Limited, a shell company registered in Hong Kong owned by Raúl Gorrín Belisario – a close associate of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores – and Binaggia’s trust. The supposed business of the joint venture was the granting of bolivar loans to PDVSA.
Binaggia informed Convit that the fake agreement could not be used and that he needed the original underlying exchange contracts. Days later in Venezuela, Urdaneta delivered the documents to Binaggia and explained that he had obtained them from a PDVSA official, identified in the indictment as Conspirator 1, likely Alvaro Ledo Nass, legal advisor of Pdvsa.
The papers Binaggia delivered to HSI-Miami revealed the source of the PDVSA funds and the nature of the scheme.
The set of documents included three items: a loan contract in bolivars repayable in dollars between Pdvsa and Rantor Capital CA – a shell company of Raúl Gorrín registered in Anzoátegui – for an amount of 7.2 billion bolivars; a subsequent contract between Rantor and Eaton Global in which the former assigned its rights as a creditor of PDVSA to the latter, and a letter from Eaton Global addressed to PDVSA, specifically to Víctor Aular Blanco, vice president of Finance, informing of the exchange and requesting that payment be made in euros (ironically, they had no accounts in bolivars) 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 was left with the obligation to pay PDVSA approximately 7.2 billion bolivars (valued at 35 million euros) and in return received 510 million euros.
The US indictment describes this operation as a “naive attempt” to cover up what was blatantly a “misappropriation of funds.”
It was already evident that this was not merely a currency transaction but a money laundering operation where Binaggia was expected to launder the proceeds of the misappropriated PDVSA funds and facilitate bribery payments to the officials who made it possible.
The risks were high, and Binaggia knew it because he had previously participated in similar schemes involving currency differentials in operations with the Treasury and with PDVSA itself, in relation to the contract with Administradora Atlantic 17107 and Violet Advisors SA of brothers Luis and Ignacio Oberto Anselmi. Rumors circulated that US authorities were investigating him.
Operation Money Flight Begins
After the meeting with the HSI department in Miami in early 2016, Binaggia left as a “confidential source” (CS) who would provide dozens of documents and recordings over the following months for the so-called Operation Money Flight, in which various US and European agencies ultimately participated.
As part of the operation, Binaggia continued to work with Convit and José Vicente Amparan, identified in the indictment as a professional money launderer.
In this way, Binaggia made cash payments in Venezuela ordered by Urdaneta and Conspirator 1 – likely Álvaro Ledo Nass – to themselves and to Aular, who received a million euros in cash.
In total, Binaggia executed transfers worth approximately 15 million euros during the summer of 2015, including several electronic transactions in dollars ordered by Convit and Urdaneta, until he began to resist making more payments, using the excuse of liquidating his trust. Binaggia argued that he could not continue without the promised currency contract, which the banks were demanding for compliance reasons.
Stalemate and New Operators
Convit and Urdaneta continued pressuring Binaggia to execute the ordered transfers. Eventually, they summoned Binaggia to a meeting at Convit’s office in Caracas. It was here that the now-infamous encounter occurred, where Convit, who had a gun on his desk, held the remote control of a German Shepherd’s collar and intimidated Binaggia by saying, “I can’t always control it.”
In that meeting, Amparan told Binaggia that the false joint venture contract had already been provided to the banks working with Portmann Capital Management Ltd in Canada and Malta, making it impossible to replace it with a simple currency contract, and that, in any case, additional forged contracts would be needed. At this point, Binaggia expressed his wish to return the PDVSA funds and reverse the transactions, a matter that was, of course, impossible.
In the following weeks, the group’s activities focused on replacing the false joint venture contract with another “better” false one to justify the initial transfers to Binaggia while continuing efforts to finalize the agreed bribes to Urdaneta and Ortega.
In the recordings made by Binaggia, group members explicitly acknowledged that what they were handling was a money laundering and illicit enrichment operation.
As months passed and the operation stalled, Gorrín and Ortega included other international financial operators such as Matthias Krull, a banker from a Swiss financial institution, and Gustavo Hernández Frieri, a Colombian by birth and naturalized US citizen, described in the indictment as a “professional money launderer.”
Binaggia continued operating with Urdaneta, Ortega, and Conspirator 1 -likely Alvaro Ledo Nass – to try to distribute PDVSA funds among themselves and other members of the scheme, based on the additional false contracts offered by Amparan.
Cilia’s Kids
From the recording of a meeting in Madrid in March 2017, to discuss the use of false bonds in the scheme, the operators’ concerns about getting their share of the loot to the children of Cilia Flores – Maduro’s stepchildren – Walter, Yoswal, and Yosser Gavidia Flores became clear.
The meeting took place at the headquarters of Columbus One Properties SL, owned by Ralph Steinmann, Luis Fernando Vuteff García, Amparan, and Darío Ale. The group’s financial operations were carried out through Portmann Capital Management Ltd.
At various points in the conversation, Urdaneta and Binaggia referred to the necessity of paying part of the operation’s profits (159 million euros) to members of the Venezuelan regime, whom they referred to on several occasions as “the kids”, “the lady’s children”, “the chamos,” or “Cilia’s acquaintances.”
From left to right: Yorwing Rodríguez, Jean Carlos Rodríguez, Yosser Gavidia, Walter Jacob Gavidia (red cap) and Yoswal Gavidia, in 2017, at a skydiving training in Los Roques. Photo by Human Rights Foundation, via ArmandoInfo.
The Origin of the Case
On December 15, 2014, Víctor Aular, vice president of Finance at Pdvsa, received instructions from the Executive Committee to sign a loan contract in bolivars payable in dollars with a company owned by Raúl Gorrín. Two days later, on December 17, Aular signed on behalf of PDVSA a contract with Rantor Capital CA for an amount of 7.2 billion bolivars. This contract was similar to one signed in March 2012 by the same Aular representing PDVSA with Administradora Atlantic 17107, which was reported as illegal this month by Tarek El Aissami to the regime’s attorney general.
At that time, the official exchange rate between the bolivar and the dollar was 6.30, meaning that 7.2 billion bolivars was equivalent to $1.143 billion. However, on the black market, the exchange rate was 182.23 bolivars per dollar, allowing Rantor (Raúl Gorrín) to exchange less than $40 million in the black market to obtain the 7.2 billion bolivars it was supposed to lend to PDVSA. The remaining difference, about $560 million, constituted the profit from the currency differential shared among Raúl Gorrín, Cilia Flores’s children, stepchildren of Nicolás Maduro, the Derwick group, senior officials of the oil company and the Ministry of Petroleum, advisors, bankers, and financial operators.
This was not the only operation carried out by Convit, his partners at Derwick, and Raúl Gorrín with Pdvsa funds.
In May 2015, when Cilia Flores’s nephew, Erik Malpica Flores – the current strongman of Miraflores – was in charge of Pdvsa’s finances, the scheme had doubled that amount to $1.2 billion through an expansion of the 2014 contract. Pdvsa sources indicate that the group repeated similar operations nearly a dozen times.
Gorrín turned to his banker, Matthias Krull, to launder the “profits” from this second operation and distribute the corresponding part to other scheme members: about $600 million deposited by Pdvsa in Gazprombank.
Operation Doubles
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 needed the justificatory contract for the origins of the funds. A few days later, Krull sent the requested document. It was an amendment to the original contract between Pdvsa and Rantor, doubling the credit line from 7.2 billion to 14 billion bolivars. The modification was dated May 25, 2015, and specifically incorporated the initial loan contract.
In the following communications, Krull sent Binaggia by email copies of Gorrín’s and Mario Bonilla Valera‘s passports, a friend and frontman for Cilia Flores’s children.
After several meetings, both in Miami and Panama, to determine the way and manner of transferring the funds, and according to a chart attached to an email in the possession of US authorities, the $600 million were distributed as follows:
A sheet titled “Detailed PDVSA Profits” shows ten transfers from PDVSA from December 29, 2014, to February 3, 2015, totaling 511,913,270 euros.
Another worksheet titled “Operation 600k Summary” indicates that of the 511 million euros:
20,476,530.83 was allocated to Portmann Capital Management Ltd., corresponding to a 4% fee. Later, the company would be fined by the Maltese financial authority in August 2018 following the charges against Convit.
227,265,537.52 euros for the “Boli” (Convit and Betancourt) who transferred 78.8 million euros to Binaggia (the trigger for Operation Money Flight) and the rest, about 148,465,000 Euros, to themselves through shell companies Volbor Vontobel and Explotación Vencon.
159,085,876.26 euros for “the kids” (Cilia Flores’s children, Maduro’s stepchildren).
68,179,661.26 euros for Raúl Gorrín, who sent dozens of dollar transfers through banks in Malta and Austria, including payments for services of planes and yachts from Miami, Florida.
The remaining 36,905,664.87 euros were accounted for as the cost of the initial 7.2 billion bolivars used to obtain the 511 million Euros.
According to Pdvsa sources, Gorrín and his Derwick partners would have engaged in at least nine similar operations.
Carlos Erik Malpica Flores, Cilia Flores’s nephew, is currently the strongman of Miraflores. Photo Poderopedia
To This Day
Four years after the US indictment against Francisco Convit, the officials, intermediaries, and financial operators involved in the scheme are either imprisoned or in hiding.
Francisco Convit is in Venezuela unable to leave due to the arrest order from US authorities and under the regime’s surveillance, fearing he might provide information, as has already happened with other members of the network.
Alejandro Betancourt was accused this month by the regime’s attorney general – within the framework of the process against Rafael Ramírez – for several corruption cases in Pdvsa, including the one related to the Oberto brothers (Administradora Atlantic 17170), which resulted in the confiscation of a house in Caracas’s Country Club and a helicopter. Betancourt’s business dealings with PetroZamora (Zulia) are also under review.
Raúl Gorrín has been on the US most-wanted list since 2019 in connection with the case of former national treasurer Alejandro Andrade, sentenced to 10 years in prison, who confessed to having received $1 billion in bribes from Gorrín to facilitate operations like those described here during Andrade’s and Claudia Díaz Guillén’s tenures, who is currently facing trial in a US court. Gorrín, who is in Venezuela under regime protection – for now – is also being investigated concerning the Operation Money Flight case.
Matthias Krull, the German banker raised in Venezuela, a resident of Panama, and a senior 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 federal witnesses. In exchange for his cooperation, a judge reduced his original ten-year sentence to three and a half in 2020. In his testimony to authorities, Krull admitted to participating in a meeting at Raúl Gorrín’s office in Caracas where he met Cilia Flores’s three children, Maduro’s stepchildren, who obtained nearly $200 million from the irregular currency operation with Pdvsa orchestrated by Gorrín and the bolichicos.
Gustavo Hernández Frieri was arrested in Sicily, Italy, in July 2018, shortly after the indictment against Convit was announced, from where he was extradited to the US. 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 serving as residence for Hernández Frieri and his family in Miami, valued at nearly $5 million.
Abraham Ortega surrendered to US authorities in 2018 and pled guilty. In May 2021, he was sentenced to two years and four months in prison after admitting to having received over $12 million in bribes transferred to financial institutions in the US. Ortega received a significant reduction in his sentence, originally five years, for being the first Venezuelan official to cooperate with US federal authorities in the case.
Carmelo Urdaneta turned himself in in Miami in August 2020 to face money laundering and corruption charges. He was released on $1.5 million bail. In July 2021, he reached a deal with the prosecution and pled guilty to conspiracy to launder money. In 2022, he was sentenced to four years in prison. For his cooperation, Urdaneta was responsible for only one of the charges. However, he was fined $35,000 and had assets worth $49 million seized, including a $5.3 million apartment in Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, as well as two apartments in Miami Beach and funds from a bank account in Switzerland.
However, not all former Pdvsa officials surrendered to cooperate and try to reduce their sentences, confiscations, and fines.
José Vicente Amparan fled from Spain, where he resided, on a flight to Turkey after it became known that US authorities were investigating these events, from where he returned to Venezuela. Before fleeing, Amparan handed a backpack full of documentation and a computer to his wife, which she left in a locker at a gym in central Madrid. Spanish police recovered this material to make it available to justice, as part of the so-called Operation Carabela.
After being linked to the scheme due to the transfer of nearly $200 million from Pdvsa to Cilia Flores’s 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 US justice. He is presumed to be in Caracas.
Luis Fernando Vuteff, a partner at Columbus One Properties, was arrested in Spain in 2018. He was on provisional release when he was detained again in Switzerland in June 2022 and extradited to the US two months later. It remains to be seen whether he will plead guilty and cooperate with authorities or maintain his innocence due to the contract.
Pedro Binaggia is believed to be living in Miami.
Maduro’s Regime Shoots Itself in the Foot
The attorney general of Maduro’s regime, Tarek William Saab, reported in late August the arrest of Víctor Aular, who was vice president of Finance at PDVSA. This arrest is part of a complaint made the day before by the Minister of Petroleum, Tarek El Aissami, against Rafael Ramírez, who was head of the oil company for more than ten years.
The Maduro regime accuses Ramírez of stealing $4.85 billion through “a fraudulent credit line with which PDVSA would have made 28 payments to two funds abroad without having received any loans.” These events occurred ten years ago.
These accusations pertain to the irregular financing contract between PDVSA and Administradora Atlantic 17107 CA from 2012, which was first revealed exclusively by this outlet, Cuentas Claras Digital, in May 2016.
Saab, in response to El Aissami’s complaint, opened an investigation into the case and ordered the seizure of properties and assets against Juan Andrés Wallis Brandt, head of Administradora 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 coerced 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’s children. In it, Aular also detailed the contract between Pdvsa and Gorrín’s companies (Rantor and Eaton Global).
Just days after Saab’s hasty accusation, other allegations from the “prosecutor” followed, in which it was evident that the regime sought to sidestep the Atlantic issue.
Finally, if PDVSA’s opaque contract with Atlantic is illegal, as the regime now claims, what about the contract with Gorrín’s company Rantor, which has identical characteristics and involves Maduro’s own stepchildren?
Furthermore, if Aular signed both similar contracts, how does the Public Ministry explain that the prosecutor Farik Karin Mora Salcedo requested in 2020 the dismissal of the Rantor (Gorrín) case, which was approved by judge Luisa Romero, while actions are announced against Aular in the Atlantic case, and he remains imprisoned without addressing current business dealings involving the currency differential conducted by Gorrín and other supposed businessmen close to Erik Malpica Flores.
As we have been saying, the Venezuelan judiciary, controlled by the autocrat, only acts when it serves Nicolás Maduro’s political interests, although in this case, it seems to have shot itself in the foot.
What is evident is that if half of what Maduro says about Ramírez and Ramírez says about Maduro is true, both should be prosecuted for the looting that Venezuela has suffered and the grave damage caused to the heritage of all Venezuelans. A confession from both, exonerating evidence.
Article 271 of the National Constitution establishes that crimes committed against public property are not subject to statute of limitations.