By Carlos Crespo
armando.info
Isaac Sultán Cohén became the Venezuelan with the most money at Credit Suisse, according to the 2022 Suisse Secrets leak. Attaining the pristine status of Swiss vaults required first getting dirty at Caribbean docks like Puerto Cabello, dealing with the spoiled food containers of ‘Pudreval’, or in the murky jurisdiction of the Cayman Islands, where he set up a network of companies that controlled bank accounts, luxurious properties, and artworks around the world.
As soon as they opened the gate, the stench was overwhelming. But the image that arose from within the massive metal box was even more nauseating than the smell that preceded it.
Inside the container were about 28 tons of food bought with public resources that had spoiled over time and due to the adverse weather in Puerto Cabello. Insects and rodents were flying around the food, which “were able to affect the quality of the product, both due to direct damage caused when insects fed on it, and indirect damage caused by their feces, bodily secretions, and the corpses of the same.”
Thus was the discovery described, in forensic precision, during the investigation by the Public Ministry regarding the 2010 case, one of the clearest portraits of the results of corruption schemes under chavismo in food imports, and which, given the image of decay it presented upon discovery, the press and public quickly dubbed the Pudreval case. A scene that in that 2010 alone was repeated in approximately 4,350 containers that held over 120,000 tons of food intended for the state-owned Venezuelan Food Producer and Distributor (Pdval).
The transformation of hundreds of millions in petrodollars into a collage of organic waste became one of the few state corruption scandals that had legal repercussions under chavismo. This performance, of course, did not take place in a nonexistent museum of waste, nor, as one might expect, in a state logistics deposit. It occurred in a private warehouse.
At that time, the owners of private warehouses – including Braperca, owned by Isaac Sultán Cohén – were among the few players who profited immensely from the Pudreval scandal. How did they manage to do this?
Curiously, Pdval began as a nationalizing experiment. One of many initiated by the late President Hugo Chávez, which resulted in an immense wastage of public resources. Conceived in early 2008 as part of a supply plan to combat what the government labeled as a “hoarding and speculation” scheme on food carried out by private entrepreneurs with political and economic purposes, Pdval had amassed $2.2 billion by February 2010 to achieve its goals.
In practice, the purchasing transactions were made by Bariven, a subsidiary also of the state-owned Pdvsa, normally responsible for buying supplies for the oil industry. But there were two incapabilities at play: on the one hand, Bariven had no experience in acquiring food; on the other, Pdval lacked the infrastructure or expertise to receive, store, and distribute the 1.7 million tons of food that the National Food Balance Center (Cenbal) recommended importing as early as 2008.
This attempt, created to put food imports and distribution under state control to avoid alleged sabotage by hoarders, ended up benefiting private parties and creating an undesired stockpiling of excesses in port warehouses.
One of the storage facilities that benefitted from these contracts at the time was Braperca, the company of Isaac Sultán Cohén that controlled a significant portion of the docks in Puerto Cabello and La Guaira, the two main ports in the country.
Now, Armando.info has gained access to two different leaked documents that, when combined, indicate that Sultán’s fortune – the money in his accounts, his properties, artworks, and business networks – experienced a sudden expansion just after the Pdval dealings.
Sultán Cohen, who has been repeatedly linked to the number two of chavismo, Diosdado Cabello, emerged from obscurity as a significant player in foreign real estate and art, opened substantial bank accounts at Credit Suisse between 2009 and 2016, at least – as that is the period covered by the reviewed data – becoming the Venezuelan client with the most money deposited in the now-troubled Swiss bank, with at least 340 million Swiss francs – around 360 million dollars at the time. At the same time, while becoming a Credit Suisse account holder, Sultán Cohen received payments from Pdval of over 50 million dollars for storage services.
In ‘Pudreval’, it all began
The timeline of Sultán Cohén’s business centers around 2009. An official Pdval report from June 2010 lists Braperca as the supplier that received the most payments in 2009, totaling 109.8 million bolívares, equivalent to 51 million dollars at that time’s official exchange rate. Among these suppliers mentioned in the official document was also Grupo Sahect, which included Samark López, one of chavismo’s favored contractors, sanctioned in 2017 by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for alleged money laundering.
However, 2009 would not turn out to be a positive year for Sultán Cohén and Braperca. At least, on the surface. Because on March 24 of that year, Hugo Chávez decreed the creation of the state-owned Bolivarian Ports Authority (Bolipuertos), which led to the national government’s takeover of port storage yards. Up until that date, regional authorities granted concessions to private warehouses to operate.
Braperca had been favored in Puerto Cabello by the former Navy commander, Carlos Aniasi Turchio, who was the president of the board of the Autonomous Institute of Puerto Cabello (Ipapc) and now lives and does business in the state of Florida.
Just a month after Braperca was occupied by Bolipuertos employees, in April 2009, Sultán opened the first account at Credit Suisse through which at least 18.97 million Swiss francs, equivalent to 20.1 million dollars, flowed. The account holder also included Venezuelan Ángel Fidalgo de La Vega, a close associate of Sultán, who has assumed the role of administrator for several of the magnate’s companies abroad.
This banking maneuver is verified in the leak that led to the series Suisse Secrets, a collaborative investigation coordinated by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, published in 2022 and involving 163 journalists from 48 allied media outlets worldwide, including Armando.info.
Braperca registered Pdval payments of over 51 million dollars in 2009. That year, Sultán Cohén opened an account at Credit Suisse. Credit: Pdval Report, June 2010.
Braperca registered Pdval payments of over 51 million dollars in 2009. That year, Sultán Cohén opened an account at Credit Suisse. Credit: Pdval Report, June 2010.
In June of that same year of apparent misfortune for Sultán, he continued to send his capital to Switzerland and opened another account at Credit Suisse through which at least 94.93 million Swiss francs, equivalent to about 100 million dollars, flowed.
By October 2012, when the decay of Pudreval had already reached its peak in the media, Sultán Cohén opened the most lucrative account at Credit Suisse, into which at least 233.3 million Swiss francs (or 247 million dollars) flowed by early 2016.
Not all who were here
Another official document highlights Braperca’s role in the Pdval case. The final report from the General Comptroller’s Office of the Republic on the case, which analyzes the program from 2008 to 2010, directly mentions the company. Among the irregularities found in this investigation is that both Bariven and private warehousing companies kept records that showed discrepancies in their figures. Discrepancies sometimes as significant as 1,000 tons per item.
For instance, Braperca topped this list of inconsistencies having 1,025 tons of powdered milk in its warehouses that did not appear on Bariven’s income sheets. Conversely, Bariven recorded the incoming of 1,480 tons of meat, liquid milk, and chicken in the yards controlled by Sultán, which were not in the private company’s inventories. This entire situation, according to the same report, revealed “the lack of coordination between Bariven and Pdval, which did not attend to a master purchasing plan.”
In the end, there were criminal liabilities related to the Pudreval case, albeit few. Only Luis Enrique Pulido López, former president of Pdval, and Ronald José Flores Burguillo and Mercedes Vileyka Betancourt Pacheco, two mid-level directors of the state company, were arrested and tried. None of the other board members, such as Egli Antonio Ramírez Coronado, Georges Kabboul Abdenour, Ángel Ramón Núñez Hernández, and Jesús Enrique Luongo Demari, were charged in the case. Years later, some faced trials for other accusations or appeared linked to judicial investigations abroad.
Ramírez Coronado, uncle of Rafael Ramírez, the then president of Pdvsa – now exiled after chavismo itself blamed him for leading a embezzlement of the state-owned company of 1.35 billion dollars – was accused of accepting bribes in the Odebrecht case when he was in charge of Pdvsa Agrícola, which was the first shareholder of Pdval, in a scheme detailed by Armando.info.
The records from Braperca, and other storage companies, did not match those of Bariven, responsible for making food purchases for Pdval. Credit: Final report from the General Comptroller’s Office.
Luongo Demari was arrested in 2018 for alleged irregularities in a fuel supply contract for the Paraguaná Refining Complex, of which he was manager before taking over as Vice President of Refining at Pdvsa. He was later included by the Public Ministry led by Tarek William Saab in the network of companies and individuals led by Diego Salazar Carreño, cousin of Rafael Ramírez, whom is held responsible for laundering over 2 billion dollars in the Andorran Private Bank and whose members are subject to criminal accusations in several jurisdictions.
Kabboul Abdenour, who was also president of Bariven, was accused of soliciting bribes in exchange for awarding or maintaining state contracts. In a lawsuit filed against Bariven in July 2009 in the Southern District Court of Florida, representatives of Validsa, Inc. accused Juan Carlos Chourio of demanding a 2 million dollar bribe, on behalf of Kabboul, to keep a food import contract worth over 160 million dollars in place. The agreement was part of the assignments made by Bariven for Pdval.
Registries in the Cayman Islands
Armando.info also accessed a set of documents from the corporate services firm Genesis Trust & Corporate Services LTD, based in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven in the northwestern Caribbean, which provide more details about Sultán Cohén’s activities in the Swiss financial system. The leak shows that the Venezuelan entrepreneur opened nine offshore companies between 2012 and 2015, all located in this Caribbean jurisdiction but mostly operating in Switzerland, Spain, the United States, Colombia, and Venezuela.
All offshore companies registered in the Cayman Islands have a physical address at an office tower north of Miami Beach, which is also used by several of Sultán’s companies in the State of Florida. In 2012, Sultán began a ravenous acquisition of properties and real estate totaling over 100 million dollars. Among these, he notably bought an entire building at 48 José Abascal Street in Madrid for 26.5 million euros on April 24, 2014. Here, the story of Sultán intersects once more with that of former deputy minister Nervis Villalobos.
Sultán Cohén concealed his name through a company registered in Luxembourg named Fimis Holding S.à r.l., which owned the shares of a Spanish company called Basgaron Spain, which was the one that purchased the building on José Abascal Street. To refurbish the building, the Venezuelan chose to hire Elecnor, and its subsidiary Area 3, a multinational of Basque origin dedicated to the electrical sector, which carried out major projects worth billions of euros during the chavismo years. Newspapers like El País in Spain related the company to the payment of alleged bribes to Villalobos for securing contracts in Venezuela and other countries.
Coincidence or not, in September 2017, Villalobos was one of Sultán Cohén’s clients with the purchase of two luxury apartments in his newly renovated building, both valued at over six million euros. These properties were seized in 2018 by the Spanish authorities on the grounds that they were acquired with money from money laundering. Judicial investigations in that country accuse Villalobos of leading a money-laundering network that bought around 115 properties in Spain.
In 2020, Villalobos faced a new investigation in Switzerland, during which 140 million francs in accounts belonging to him and his children across eight banks in that country were frozen. “[There are] serious and concrete indications that the assets come from crimes committed abroad,” stated federal prosecutors in that country. The newspaper Tages Anzeiger, based in Zurich, reported on the case, indicating that a luxurious apartment overlooking Lake St. Moritz, valued at six million Swiss francs, was also seized. “The real estate market is a major gateway for money laundering in Switzerland. This case illustrates that perfectly,” declared Martin Hilti, a representative of Transparency International Switzerland, to the mentioned media.
The documents accessed by Armando.info confirm that Sultán’s nine companies registered in the Cayman Islands remained active at least until September 2021. Among the companies operating in Switzerland are Prime Assets Company; Blanco Ltd. and Tamiami Company. All three hold bank accounts or manage investment portfolio accounts.
Included among the companies is Ibericlake Holdings Limited, a company that Sultán uses for his real estate investments. This offshore company acts as the manager of UPH01S LLC, a Florida-registered company that in February 2017 purchased a 2,800 square meter penthouse, including its own pool, for 25.5 million dollars. This property was the second most expensive apartment sold in Florida that year. Leadership of the Florida company was later joined by Ángel Fidalgo, the same individual who shares an account at Credit Suisse with Sultán.
The Genesis Trust records add that Ibericlake is a shareholder in four Florida-based companies, and each of these companies owns an apartment in Miami. “The company also owns a bank account that is used to cover the expenses of the apartments,” adds the document. Almost all the other companies in the Cayman Islands, in turn, own stakes in other companies that hold bank accounts or investment portfolio accounts. These configurations are often used to reduce tax burdens and conceal the name of the ultimate beneficiary of the companies.
Since February 28, Armando.info has sent requests for interviews and a questionnaire to the legal representatives of Sultán Cohén. The lawyers confirmed receipt of the questionnaire but had not yet responded to the questions by the time of publication of this report. On March 6, a questionnaire was also sent to the corporate email of Genesis Trust, which has not received any response.