A massive money-laundering case centered on the alleged theft of more than $1 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company has expanded with new charges accusing a pair of financial asset managers with helping move bribery payments into Miami bank accounts and real estate for Venezuelan government officials.
By AOL – Jay Weaver
Jul 12, 2022
Newly charged in the Miami conspiracy case: Ralph Steinmann, 48, of Switzerland, and Luis Fernando Vuteff, 51, of Argentina.
Steinmann is at large, according to U.S. authorities. Vuteff, who is the son-in-law of a prominent political opponent of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, was recently arrested in Switzerland and awaits extradition to the United States.
A criminal complaint alleges that Steinmann and Vuteff conspired with several others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from a bribery scheme involving senior Venezuelan oil company officials accused of approving lucrative loan contracts for elite businessmen close to Maduro’s government. The profits from those deals were washed through favorable government currency trades and yielded windfall fortunes for the so-called kleptocrats between 2014 and 2018, the complaint says.
Both asset managers used European and U.S. banks to move millions from the corruption scheme to line the pockets of at least two Venezuelan public officials, including the oil ministry’s general counsel, Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui, according to the Homeland Security Investigations complaint. It was filed by federal prosecutors Kurt Lunkenheimer and Paul Hayden.
Urdaneta, 48, was sentenced to more than four years in prison last month by a federal judge in Miami.
Urdaneta, the former legal counsel for Venezuela’s Ministry of Oil and Mining, was convicted last year of accepting tens of millions of dollars in bribes and investing some of his illicit payments in a Sunny Isles Beach high-rise condo and other real estate in the Miami area. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams imposed a $35,000 fine as part of Urdaneta’s sentence along with approving the feds’ seizure of $49 million worth of assets, including his luxury condo and Swiss bank account.
Urdaneta is the fourth defendant to be sent to prison in the sprawling money-laundering conspiracy case, which was initially filed in 2018. Five other defendants in the Miami case – excluding the newly charged Steinmann and Vuteff – remain fugitives in Venezuela, other South American countries and Europe.
Urdaneta sneaked across Venezuela’s border with Colombia before surrendering to U.S. authorities in Miami in 2020. Last year, he pleaded guilty to a single money-laundering conspiracy count while providing insider information about corruption in Venezuela and tainted proceeds hidden in South Florida bank accounts and real estate investments – including incriminating information about Steinmann and Vuteff, according to sources familiar with the probe.
As part of Urdaneta’s plea agreement, U.S. authorities seized a $5.3 million condo in the Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, along with two apartments in Miami Beach and all of his assets in a Swiss bank account. In total, authorities have taken $49 million from Urdaneta that is traceable to his criminal activity of accepting bribes in exchange for providing access to Venezuelan government contracts such as PDVSA business loans and currency trades, prosecutors said.
In 2021, Urdaneta’s colleague, Abraham Edgardo Ortega, the former executive director of financial planning at PDVSA, was sentenced to more than two years in prison after he admitted accepting more than $12 million in bribes that were secretly wired to U.S. and other financial institutions in Miami. Ortega also cooperated with prosecutors.
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Read More: AOL – Miami’s $1B Venezuelan money-laundering case grows. New charges against 2 financial execs
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