Ex-Venezuelan treasurer testifies his successor got rich in corrupt kickback scheme

A former Venezuelan national treasurer who pleaded guilty to stealing $1 billion from his country and hiding millions in South Florida testified Monday that he amassed his fortune by accepting massive bribes from politically connected businessmen who were given access to conduct lucrative foreign currency trades for Venezuela’s government.

“I made agreements with certain persons to make profits and to get paid bribes,” Alejandro Andrade Cedeno admitted at the first-of-its-kind federal corruption trial of his successor.

Andrade, who once owned an equestrian estate in the Wellington area of Palm Beach County and later served three years in prison on a money-laundering conviction, is the Department of Justice’s central witness in the bribery case against Venezuela’s former national treasurer, Claudia Díaz Guillen, and her husband, Adrian Velásquez Figueroa. They are fighting the charges, saying they committed no crimes.

Andrade, appearing in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, testified that he recruited Díaz into the alleged corruption scheme when she became Venezuela’s treasurer a decade ago, and prosecutors said that the couple received more than $100 million in bribes.

Díaz is the first former Venezuelan official to face U.S. criminal charges before a federal jury in South Florida, following a long line of Venezuelan officials, businessmen, lawyers and other so-called kleptocrats who have chosen to plead guilty to U.S. money laundering charges to avoid long prison sentences that carry a maximum of 20 years.

Andrade’s testimony also marked the first time that he has spoken publicly about his complex international crime, which was built upon Venezuela’s vast oil income while the country suffered an economic collapse.

On the witness stand, Andrade detailed how former President Hugo Chávez gave him complete control of the national treasury in 2007. Andrade, who became close to Chávez through their military backgrounds, explained how he cultivated lucrative relationships with three businessmen with brokerage houses that traded bolivars for dollars in order to supply Venezuela’s government with ample domestic currency. He said he allowed them to trade on the wide spread between the government-controlled and open-market exchanges in order to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits and pay him kickbacks.

Andrade testified that one of the three businessmen, Raul Gorrín, paid massive bribes not only to him but also to his successor, Díaz, and her husband, Velásquez, who acted as her go-between with Gorrín. Andrade said Gorrín asked him to approach Díaz about continuing the bribery scheme to allow him to trade bolivars for dollars for the Venezuelan government when she became the national treasurer in 2011. He said she agreed to do it, and share the profits with him and Gorrín.

““Half would go to her [Díaz] and the other half would be split between Raul [Gorrín] and me,” Andrade testified Tuesday.

Gorrín, a wealthy television network executive, is a fugitive living in Venezuela who was initially charged in the corruption case in late 2018 after Andrade pleaded guilty and was sentenced by a federal judge to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $1 billion to the U.S. government.

Andrade, who said he still lives in Wellington with his daughter and grandchildren, was forced to give up his equestrian estate with more than a dozen show horses, his fleet of exotic cars and other assets as part of his plea agreement. Gorrín had compensated Andrade in part by paying his bills, including a private jet, when he was living in both Venezuela and South Florida, according to emails, spreadsheets and other documents presented at trial.

As part of his deal with prosecutors, Andrade also paid $250 million hidden in his Swiss bank accounts to the U.S. government.

Asked by a Justice Department lawyer where the balance went, Andrade said: ”The rest of the money is in the hands of other people,” without elaborating further.

Later in his testimony on Tuesday, Andrade said that Gorrín was still holding between $80 million and $100 million in bribery payments owed to him from their foreign-currency exchange schemes when he was Venezuela’s national treasurer and when Díaz held the position.

Andrade disclosed that he originally became an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2014 after he left his high-ranking position in the Venezuelan government three years earlier. He said the U.S. government allowed him to stay in the United States and granted him visas so he could provide inside information on drug trafficking, corruption and money laundering in his native country.

Andrade also provided details of his criminal activities to federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Andrade testified that he profited from the bolivar-dollar currency exchanges with Gorrín and then engaged Díaz to continue the corruption scheme so that all of them could make millions from trading Venezuela’s oil income on the exchanges — even after he left office. During his testimony, Andrade pointed out that he was making about $100,000 a year while serving as Venezuela’s national treasurer for five years.

During cross examination, Díaz’s defense attorney, Marissel Descalzo, pointed out that practically all of the prosecution’s documents, including spreadsheets detailing bribery payments, text messages and WhatsApp chats, were between Andrade and Gorrín — but did not involve Díaz.

Andrade said he never communicated in writing with Díaz about the payoffs from the foreign currency trades, that he only spoke with her about them by phone after he left Venezuela’s national treasury and she headed the agency.

Descalzo also said that Andrade was driven to cooperate with federal agents because he feared going back to Venezuela and was desperate to obtain a visa to stay in the United States. “I was looking for a way to get it,” he testified.

She even said that Gorrín tried to use his influence with then-Vice President Mike Pence in June 2017 to help Andrade avoid deportation, and that Gorrín may have also met with President Donald Trump at that same time.

Andrade said he was aware of Gorrín’s meeting with Pence, but not Trump, adding that the business with Pence was not about his predicament.

By the end of that year, Descalzo pointed out that Andrade met with agents at Homeland Security Investigations to talk about his corrupt relationship with Gorrín and others in the currency exchange scheme, but didn’t mention Díaz to them until 2018.

Díaz and her husband, who were charged with money laundering in December 2020, are accused of accepting at least $65 million in bribes from Gorrín, according to an indictment. But prosecutors said that Gorrín made payoffs to the couple through offshore companies, South Florida bank accounts, a Miami yacht firm and a fashion shell company totaling more than $100 million at their trial that started Monday.

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. Díaz succeeded Andrade, who served from 2007 to early 2011 as Venezuela’s treasurer. He had once worked as a bodyguard for Chavez, the late socialist president who died in 2013.

During opening statements at Monday’s trial, Justice Department lawyer Paul Hayden said the couple played key roles in a money laundering scheme fueled by “greed and corruption.”

“Díaz amassed a fortune from Gorrín,” Hayden told the 12-member jury, adding that she used her husband as a “front man” to deal directly with Gorrín in the alleged foreign-currency exchange scheme. “What Díaz did was corrupt and criminal.”

Díaz’s defense attorney, Descalzo, countered that she and her husband committed no crime, despite the money trail linking Gorrín to them.

Descalzo said that when Díaz took over as Venezuela’s national treasurer, she eliminated Andrade’s policy of dealing only with the three connected businessmen in the bolivar-dollar currency exchanges and opened up the trades to any government bidders. Descalzo said that, as a result, Díaz provided no “benefit” directly to Gorrín, so her compensation from him “was not a bribe” and she husband could not have committed money laundering in the United States.

“There was a lot of money floating around, but being rich is not a crime,” Descalzo told the jurors. “Claudia could not have been bribed because there was no benefit for Claudia to give Raul Gorrín,” she said.