Corruption trial of ex-Venezuela treasurer a key test for Miami federal prosecutors

For years, federal prosecutors in Miami have charged dozens of Venezuelan officials, businessmen and other so-called kleptocrats with collectively stealing billions of dollars from their oil-rich nation and diverting windfall fortunes into South Florida’s banks and real estate market.

With the exception of fugitives still at large, all of the Venezuelan defendants have cut plea deals to avoid long U.S. prison sentences, including former national treasurer, Alejandro Andrade, who served under the late socialist president, Hugo Chávez. He pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge in South Florida five years ago.

For federal prosecutors, winning has been fairly easy, partly because they’ve never had to prove their cases in court. But a case set to begin Monday shapes up as a new test for prosecutors targeting foreign officials accused of corruption. Andrade’s successor as treasurer, Claudia Díaz Guillen, will be going to trial along with her husband. She will become the first former Venezuelan official to face U.S. criminal charges before a federal jury in South Florida.

Díaz and her husband, Adrian Velásquez Figueroa, are accused of accepting at least $65 million in bribes from a wealthy Caracas businessman, Raul Gorrín, who prosecutors say used his political connections to conduct highly profitable foreign currency-exchange transactions for the Venezuelan government. Gorrín, who was indicted in 2018, is wanted by U.S. authorities but won’t be in the Fort Lauderdale federal courtroom with the couple because he remains in Venezuela. But he has been tweeting about the case to the dismay of prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Justice Department, court records show.

Díaz, 49, a former naval officer and a former nurse for Chávez, served as Venezuela’s national treasurer from 2011 to 2013. Her husband, Velásquez, 43, was a former presidential security guard. Both were extradited from Spain to face trial in South Florida and have been held without bond at the Federal Detention Center in Miami.

DOJ’S ‘playbook’

“This trial follows DOJ’s playbook of pursuing money laundering charges against foreign citizens who allegedly receive bribes in their home country and later allegedly use the bribe money in South Florida,” said Miami lawyer Marcos Jimenez, the former U.S. attorney in South Florida during President George W. Bush’s administration.

Proving the case will be challenging for South Florida prosecutors, mainly because they’ve never had to do it in a courtroom before jurors. Relying on key witnesses such as Andrade, email correspondence and wire transfers, prosecutors will try to convince jurors that decade-old bribery payments allegedly transferred by Gorrín from Switzerland to Miami for Díaz and her husband amount to a crime in the United States.

Defending Díaz and her husband also will be challenging for attorneys Marissel Descalzo and Andrew Feldman, who already tried unsuccessfully to get the case thrown out, arguing that the charges are old and the statute of limitations has run out. The attorneys are also fighting the prosecution’s plan to use Andrade as a witness.

For starters, there’s a well-documented history of corruption associated with the former Chávez regime and the government’s national oil company, PDVSA. It is recognized as the main economic engine of the distressed South American country, but also as the alleged piggy bank for Venezuela’s high-ranking officials and connected kleptocrats, several of whom have been convicted in plea deals in Miami.

As a result, the two-week trial before U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas promises to be fraught with uncertainty for both the prosecution and the defense.

Jimenez, who has experience in foreign corruption cases, said “the challenge” for prosecutors will be verifying the testimony of cooperating witnesses such as Andrade who have pleaded guilty to crimes and “whose credibility is therefore suspect.”

He also said prosecutors will also have to put on evidence of “complex acts that happened ten years ago,” opening them up to defense attacks about witness testimony and why they didn’t bring the charges sooner.

But Jimenez said that the defense team for Díaz and her husband will have to counter “what appears to be significant documentary evidence of large amounts of money allegedly received or transferred by a former official on a government salary.”

Díaz succeeded Andrade, who served from 2007 to early 2011 as Venezuela’s treasurer. Andrade, who had once worked as Chávez’s bodyguard, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in the $1.2 billion money-laundering case and was sentenced to 10 years in November 2018. He cooperated with U.S. authorities and secretly provided evidence on Díaz, her husband, Gorrín, and a Venezuelan banker who operated a bank in the Dominican Republic to steer some of the bribery payments to the group, according to the indictment and other court records.

Thanks to his assistance, Andrade’s sentence was slashed to 3-1/2 years and he was released from federal prison last February. He is now expected to testify against the couple — though information about his sentence reduction and role as a witness have been kept under seal in the court record.

Gorrín, 54, who owns a TV station in Venezuela along with dozens of U.S.-frozen luxury properties in Miami and New York, is considered a fugitive after being indicted four years ago as the mastermind of the bribery conspiracy during the presidency of the late Venezuelan president, Chávez, who died in 2013. Gorrín continued to wield his influence during the presidency of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, according to federal authorities.

Venezuela-Miami connection

A federal grand jury charged Gorrín with a foreign-corruption conspiracy and all three defendants with a money-laundering scheme — with the domestic connection the use of bank accounts in Miami to hold some of the proceeds. The initial case against Gorrín was filed in 2018, and Díaz and her husband were later added as defendants.

According to the indictment, Gorrín had the inside track to convert foreign currency through a brokerage house for the government, trading bolivars for dollars on a preferential exchange system that produced astronomical profits for him and high-ranking Venezuelan officials. The vast revenues required to sustain the alleged scheme flowed from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA.

All three defendants are accused of using Miami bank accounts to receive and hide millions stolen from the Venezuelan government to keep the bribery scheme going between 2011 and 2013, when Díaz served as the national treasurer, according to the indictment.

“ln total, [Gorrín] paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to secure the rights to engage in over $1 billion in foreign currency exchange transactions that resulted in profits to [him] of hundreds of millions of dollars,” says the indictment, brought by prosecutors Kurt Lunkenheimer and Paul Hayden.

To secure “this improper advantage,” Gorrín used both personal and corporate bank accounts “to wire bribe payments” to Miami for Díaz and her husband as well as her predecessor {Andrade] as Venezuela’s national treasurer, the indictment says. The scheme also used shell companies to disguise transactions, according to the indictment.

During Díaz’s tenure as national treasurer, Gorrín also continued to make bribery payments totaling about $94 million to Andrade through his Swiss bank accounts until 2017, according to the indictment. It was Andrade who introduced Gorrín to Díaz, paving the way for the alleged bribery scheme to continue after Andrade resigned in January 2011.

The couple, along with Andrade and Gorrín, are among dozens of former Venezuelan government officials, business people and associates who have been charged with money laundering in Miami stemming from a series of foreign corruption probes led by Homeland Security Investigations’ El Dorado Task Force South and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

After Andrade’s sentencing, federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations seized about $250 million from his Swiss bank accounts — funds kept by the U.S. government. In addition, HSI agents also seized his equestrian farm in the exclusive Wellington area of Palm Beach County, 14 prized show-jumping horses, and a fleet of luxury cars, including a 2015 Bentley Continental Convertible.

The horses, with such names as Bonjovi, Hardrock Z and Tinker Bell, were imported from various parts of Europe and ridden by Andrade’s son in international show-jumping competitions, court records show.