The Wedding
Recently, Jorge Romanov, son of Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia and Prince Francisco Guillermo of Prussia, married Italian writer and lobbyist Rebecca Bettarini at St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Before this significant moment, they hosted a pre-wedding dinner to share early moments with their guests (who ultimately numbered over 400 at the marriage). This event took place at the Palace of Grand Prince Vladimir, now known as the House of Scientists. Similarly, following the ceremony, they provided a gala dinner for their 550 guests at the Ethnographic Museum, where the bride opted for a stunning tulle dress adorned with pearls and embroidery by Reem Acra, completed with a white silk cape with puffed sleeves by Elina Samarina. Pure elegance, as highlighted by the image of the Duchess of Anjou, Margarita Vargas, who was also present at the celebration and turned heads throughout the evening.
During the gala dinner, the Duchess of Anjou shined like never before in an Elie Saab design chosen for the occasion. This piece featured transparent material at the neckline and skirt, with sequined embroidery creating an entirely elegant white and black contrast. The garment sculpted the body at the chest and waist, flaring subtly down to the floor and presenting a discreet teardrop back neckline, enhancing its flattering effect. Styling was done by Cristina Reyes, who completed the look with a black cashmere scarf from Again Cashmere, a black satin clutch from Jimmy Choo (the same brand responsible for her shoes in matching tone and fabric), as noted by the magazine Hola.
If there were still czars in Russia, emperors in Germany, and kings in Greece, Bulgaria, or Romania, a crown would hang from all branches of the tree planted by Queen Victoria of England and her husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg. Out of nearly a thousand direct descendants of the British monarch, who passed away over a century ago, currently, five wear a crown: Elizabeth of England, Harald of Norway, Margarita of Denmark, Carl Gustav of Sweden, and Felipe of Bourbon. All mourn the death of “Uncle” Felipe, the elder of the royal houses of Europe and their own families, who, like them, belonged to the group that called themselves “the royal cousins of Europe.” This was no euphemism, as in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most children and grandchildren of Victoria and Albert held titles or were consorts of a royal house.
The death of Felipe of Edinburgh on April 9, 2021, shook the royal tree, emphasizing the kinship ties with kings and queens, princes, and princesses who for decades forged endogamous marriages that strengthened family ties.
Felipe VI of Spain, alongside Queen Letizia, recalled in his condolence telegram his “dear uncle Philip” (sic), descending through three lines from Queen Victoria. His maternal grandparents, Pablo and Federica of Greece, were, respectively, grandson and granddaughter of Princess Victoria, the firstborn of the British monarch, and his paternal grandfather, Juan de Bourbon, was in turn a grandson of Princess Beatrice, the youngest. Just in case he needed more kinship with Felipe of Edinburgh, he was, besides being a great-grandson of Princess Alice of England, a cousin of King Paul of Greece through the Greek lineage, explained Mariángel Alcázar in La Vanguardia.
Jorge Romanov is the most ‘Spanish’ descendant of the Russian dynasty. He was born in Spain, just like his mother, Maria Romanova. His great-grandfather was a first cousin of Nicholas II.
Margarita’s Husband
When in 2019 the imposing door of the Valley of the Fallen basilica opened for Francisco Franco’s coffin to exit, the procession was led by two well-known faces: Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú, grandson of the dictator, and Luis Alfonso de Bourbon, great-grandson of Franco and the favorite grandson of Carmen Franco, the only daughter of the marriage formed by the dictator and Carmen Polo.
Luis Alfonso, 45, walked with his head held high, proud of his mission and carrying not only the physical weight of the coffin but also the historical burden placed upon him by two families who entrusted him with the responsibility of being their representative. He is the great-grandson of King Alfonso XIII and the dictator who ruled Spain for 40 years. Son of Carmen Martínez-Bordiú, Franco’s granddaughter, who married Alfonso de Borbón Dampierre, heir to the nonexistent throne of France, reported Maite Nieto in EL PAÍS in 2019.
It was his grandmother, Carmen Franco, who raised him, educated him, and instilled the firm religious and patriotic beliefs of the family after his father, Alfonso de Borbón, passed away in 1989 (his parents had separated seven years earlier), when Luis Alfonso was just 14 years old.
In 2017, after his grandmother’s death—who had entrusted him with overseeing the family estate that she had not entrusted to her own children—Luis Alfonso assumed the honorary president position of the Francisco Franco Foundation. Until then, only his appearances as Duke of Anjou and heir to the fictitious throne of France, along with institutional videos posted on YouTube, indicated his alignment with the more traditional right.
However, despite a quieter role, in recent years, he has engaged in activities that clearly show his full support for the radical right, such as his participation in the last two editions of the World Congress of Families, where “the natural family” was defended, and gay marriage, laws protecting LGTBI rights, and “radical feminism” were rejected.
Like much of the family clan, his media appearances were often related to gossip press or his business ventures. Luis Alfonso has four children with Margarita Vargas Santaella—daughter of Víctor José Vargas Irausquín, owner of Banco Occidental de Descuento and one of Venezuela’s largest fortunes—with whom he married in 2004.
This exclusive wedding, held in Santo Domingo, enabled him to become the representative in Europe for his father-in-law’s bank and to hold high executive positions in its Latin American subsidiaries. Furthermore, Carmen Franco’s trust made him the CEO of Filoasa, the parent company managing the Franco real estate holdings, with over 170 properties across Spain.
His own fortune—the inheritance from his father and the nearly four-million-euro compensation he received for an accident while skiing in Colorado (USA)—also allowed him to venture into the business world. Since 2017, he has been the sole administrator of Spanish Influencers, advertised as the “first Spanish portal for connecting companies and the influence of celebrities,” and previously started a gym in Madrid, Reto 48.
His entrepreneurial activity has led him to appear in various Latin American media, which report on the complicated situation Luis Alfonso de Borbón faces with Banco de Orinoco, owned by his father-in-law, where he holds a directorship. Reports suggest that the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Curaçao (former Dutch Antilles) is considering pressing charges for alleged fraud. Social media is filled with hundreds of those affected, bearing the hashtag #EstafadosBOD, criticizing the institution and mentioning Franco’s great-grandson, who they claim was presented as “the prince,” a title that, combined with the Bourbon name, influenced their trust in the solvency of the entity.
Now, the weight of his legacy, which has shaped his entire life, is echoed in his latest Instagram post, published after the exhumation of his great-grandfather: “My paternal lineage deeply connects me with France, (…) where I have dynastic obligations. (…) At the same time, I must fulfill the duties of my maternal line. (…) I owe it to myself to be faithful to the memory so unjustly attacked of my great-grandfather. (…) Defending your memory is an integral part of my idea of honor and loyalty.”
The Banking Father-in-Law
Víctor Vargas is a socialist. The father of Luis Alfonso’s wife defined himself as “a socialist in the true sense of the word” in The Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, as opposites attract, he did not mind that his daughter Margarita married the great-grandson of Franco in 2004. The wedding, held in La Romana (Dominican Republic), boasted 1,500 guests and featured entertainment by Juan Luis Guerra. The socialist financier of the Bolivarian regime never hid his excitement about some of his grandchildren’s blood being tinged with royal blue. The wedding’s godfather was Vargas, a lawyer and financier born 66 years ago in Barinas, the same area as Hugo Chavez. Whether the wedding of Luis Alfonso was funded by Chavismo remains unknown, but it can be asserted that Víctor Vargas was forming an alliance with Chavista revolution at the time.
From two institutional positions, as President of the Venezuelan Banking Association and the National Banking Council, Vargas supported, publicly and privately, some of the most controversial measures of the Bolivarian Revolution in economics. His businesses experienced significant growth after Chavismo came to power. However, at the end of 2016, 12 years after the grand wedding, those lucrative relationships with political power turned dangerous when, upon returning from a trip abroad, Luis Alfonso’s father-in-law was taken by security agents to the central headquarters of the political police in Caracas and interrogated for over two hours. Nicolás Maduro’s intelligence services questioned him about the blackout on December 2 of that year on Venezuela’s primary electronic payment platform, managed by the company Credicard, of which Vargas controlled 33 percent. Media outlets close to Vargas took 48 hours to spread the news that the banker had not been arrested but merely “invited to talk” with the authorities. He soon returned to life in freedom, piloting his jets and helicopters. Later, the name of Luis Alfonso’s father-in-law, along with some of his own and affiliated companies, appeared on the Falciani List alongside thousands of names of potential tax evaders. All noise. Life goes on, Víctor Vargas and his second wife (who is the same age as his daughter Margarita) enjoy each summer a few days in Cádiz. The arrival at a special dock of Víctor Vargas’s yacht in Sotogrande is a summer event, perhaps due to the 60 meters length of the vessel or the amount of Ferraris and expensive horses aboard. Luis Alfonso claims that this lavish life of ‘socialist’ Vargas has nothing to do with him, whose three children share a tablet, he says, living quite Spartan in some ways.
Víctor Vargas is the owner of the investment holdings company Cartera de Inversiones de Venezuela, which includes Banco Occidental de Descuento (BOD), an entity that in a decade managed to surpass its original regional reach (Zulia state) to become the fifth-largest bank in the country. This position was consolidated in September 2013 after the BOD absorbed the Chilean entity Corp Banca (which Vargas had purchased in 2008). The operation, approved by the Superintendence of Banks and Other Financial Institutions (Sudeban), was frozen between 2009 and 2013 due to a series of requirements imposed by Sudeban.
A confessed lover of luxury cars, horses, yachts, mansions, and private planes, the Barinas-born banker owns a polo team, Lechuza Caracas (valued at 2 million dollars in 2009), based in Florida, competing in tournaments of this elite sport in the United States.
In Caracas, he lives in a mansion at the traditional Country Club, has another property in the Dominican Republic, and a luxury apartment in New York. He has polo estates in Falcón, which he reaches by helicopter, the most expensive executive jet in the world (a Grumman Gulfstream valued at 50 million dollars), a 150-foot yacht, and several Italian Augusta helicopters (50 million dollars). His fortune, estimated at 1.2 billion dollars, spans from banking to oil holdings in Venezuela, Panama, the United States, and the Dominican Republic, overseeing about 6,500 employees across several countries.
In the year he requested the merger of Corp Banca and BOD to Sudeban, he purchased one of the most expensive mansions in Palm Beach, Florida, styled in Polynesian architecture, covering 15,000 square meters, at a price of 70 million dollars, a figure that only superstars pay. In the same area, he had previously bought another Mediterranean-style mansion in 2005 for 33.6 million dollars.
In 2008, he told The Wall Street Journal: “People write stories about me saying I have a Ferrari, a plane, and a yacht. But that’s not true. I have three planes, two yachts, six houses. I have been rich all my life.”
But this controversial phrase is questioned when looking into his origins. Son of a doctor (Víctor José Martiniano Vargas Hernández) and the first judge of Venezuela’s Supreme Court (Nohemí Irausquín Suárez), he married young Carmen Leonor Santaella Tellerías, from a wealthy family with connections to economic power in Venezuela. She was the one who gifted him his first Alfa Romeo and opened the doors to financial businesses.
His classmates from Andrés Bello Catholic University remember him as an ambitious young man, noting that “his behavior already gave him away back in those times.”
Despite his fortune and fondness for luxury, he considers himself a humble man who cares about Venezuela. “I am a socialist in the real sense of the word,” he declared to WSJ in 2008.
This businessman who professes leftist ideas has seven financial entities in Curaçao, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Antigua, and Venezuela.
In Europe, he mingles with nobility. The Spanish press identifies him as “Víctor de Vargas e Irausquín,” after his daughter Margarita married Luis Alfonso de Borbón, Duke of Anjou, heir to the Spanish royal family and great-grandson of dictator Francisco Franco. Besides being a son-in-law, he serves as an alternate director of BOD.
At Margarita and Luis Alfonso’s wedding, held on November 6, 2004, in the Dominican Republic, 1,000 guests attended, including both Chavista officials and figures from the Venezuelan opposition, like former presidential candidate Manuel Rosales. Investigation into the case reveals speculation that during that meeting of bankers, the assassination of Venezuelan prosecutor Danilo Anderson was planned. A bodyguard of Vargas allegedly carried information to the Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office. The dinner was catered by the prestigious restaurant Le Cirque in New York, and the luxurious evening was enlivened by the orchestra of Juan Luis Guerra.
Separated from Santaella since 2008, but not divorced, Vargas fathered a son in mid-2013 with his girlfriend María Beatriz Hernández, a jewelry designer and engineer, with whom he has a 30-year age difference. Together with his sisters, he has a jewelry design firm called Nefesh, based in Maracay.
One of the sisters of Vargas’s new partner, Melany Hernández, serves as vice president of Boi Bank, the international bank owned by the holding company based in Antigua.
In December 2013, the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) of Venezuela declared the divorce petition with Santaella invalid, which had been approved eight months earlier (May 13, 2013). This decision was viewed as a setback in Vargas’s relationship history with the government, in a country where the executive controls all powers.
In 2002, Vargas was one of the bankers who advised his sector colleagues not to join the national strike called by the opposition seeking to oust Chávez from power. A cordial bridge between banking and Chávez’s government, he served as president of the Venezuelan Banking Association from 2009 to 2010 and chaired the National Banking Council from 2010 to 2011.
As a display of his good relations with the government, especially with powerful ministers from the economic cabinet, Jorge Giordani and Nelson Merentes—former president of the BCV—Vargas acted as coordinator for the sale of bonds and structured notes which Chávez bought from Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador, among other countries, to finance his internal deficits.
Since 2002, with the implementation of currency controls, banking in Venezuela (and BOD is no exception) achieved enormous gains by selling papers bought at the official exchange rate in the so-called parallel market. These operations were later prohibited by the authorities.
Víctor Vargas’s name also appears in the Wikileaks cables. One leaked cable from the Department of State (July 23, 2008) described the banker’s ties to the so-called structured notes, a fundraising mechanism for financing the official budget, generating considerable profits for intermediaries. The cable states: “Vargas, said to have benefited from these deals, is a banker whose star has greatly risen during Chávez’s presidency.”
During the banking crisis of 2009, Vargas played an important role in addressing the closure of over half a dozen private banks due to insufficient funds. In an interview, he stated, “We aligned ourselves with this government policy because we believe they have done it correctly. And we are even willing to collaborate, as we always have been, in everything necessary.”
However, not all relationships between Vargas and the government have been smooth. In 2008, he attempted to buy Banco de Venezuela, the largest in the country, which belonged to Spain’s Grupo Santander headed by Emilio Botín. While negotiating with the Iberian banker, behind the scenes at the Miraflores Palace, José Vicente Rangel, who at that time had left the government, was lobbying for President Hugo Chávez and Finance Minister Alí Rodríguez Araque to approve the negotiation between BOD and Venezuela, according to a source close to the acquisition process. However, Rangel failed in his mission because Chávez and Araque decided that the state would be the new owner of the entity.
Nonetheless, the banker had given 150 million dollars as an option, which was not returned by Botín. Vargas sued in Spain and won the case, which was handled by his lawyer Ramón José Medina, who was also a representative of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD). Medina confided to a source that he is currently disconnected from the corporate dealings of BOD.
Víctor Vargas’s business in the US financial system has also drawn controversies. According to The Wall Street Journal, he lied about a fraud committed by employees of CapitalBank Corp, a New York bank intervened by the authorities in which he held a 21% stake. This is the reason preventing him from participating in the American financial sector without explicit authorization from that country’s authorities.
A businessman, in 2013, he ventured into the media market by purchasing one of the largest editorial groups in the country, Cadena Capriles (renaming it Grupo Últimas Noticias), a transaction that he denied through the BOD corporate Twitter account: “the purchase of Cadena Capriles by BOD Banca or Víctor Vargas is not true. It is neither of our interest nor allowed by the Banking Law,” the tweet states, referring to Venezuelan legislation that prohibits bank owners from also having ownership in media outlets. This transaction is estimated to have reached 140 million dollars.
In February 2013, Vargas visited the headquarters of Cadena Capriles. According to Miguel Ángel Capriles, then president of the editorial group, the banker expressed his desire to make the purchase. A few months later, in May, it became a fact that the media company was sold, and a transition process began that culminated in October.
On October 25, 2013, the sale of Cadena Capriles for 140 million dollars was signed between Miguel Ángel Capriles López and Latam Media Holding, a firm registered in Curaçao in September of that year, which in turn is owned by Hanson Group, a financial group based in London that had never before owned a media outlet.
When the transfer document was signed, among those present was Víctor Vargas, who refrained from appearing in the photograph of the moment. Additionally, the board, chaired by banker Carlos Acosta –a childhood friend of Miguel Ángel Capriles—was integrated by at least two people very close to the banker: Pedro Rendón and Diego Lepage, both trusted personnel at BOD and other businesses.
Moreover, Vargas himself assured during a meeting with the editors of Últimas Noticias and El Mundo Economía Negocios, media outlets from Cadena Capriles, that he was the owner.
In February 2014, the appointment of the new editor-in-chief of Cadena Capriles, David De Lima, and the removal of the board of directors was announced. The new supreme authority hesitated when explaining Vargas’s involvement.
The BOD, one of the 2,000 most important companies in the world according to Forbes magazine, is going through a difficult episode. On September 10, 2019, Sudeban ordered an administrative intervention of the entity for 120 working days. This measure, authorized by Maduro’s economy minister, Simón Zerpa, prohibits making new investments, declaring dividend payments, raising funds for terms, opening new offices domestically or abroad, and acquiring shares and stakes in the capital of banking institutions.
Likewise, it ordered the appointment of officials accredited by Sudeban who would have veto power on the board of directors and full access to all administrative areas of BOD.
This decision emerged, according to the official press release, due to actions taken by Curaçao and Panama regarding Banco del Orinoco NV and AllBank Corp, respectively, which are part of the BOD Financial Group.
On September 12, 2019, following the public news of the administrative intervention, Vargas stated that the Sudeban measure “is merely administrative and aims to supervise financial activity,” consequently, the bank would continue providing services normally.
Source: Prensa América