Claudia Patricia Díaz, better known as “Chávez’s nurse” and her husband, Adrián Velásquez Figueroa, were wanted by the United States to respond to accusations of money laundering resulting from acts of corruption in Venezuela related to the exchange control system.
The former national treasurer of Venezuela Claudia Patricia Díaz Guillén and her husband, Adrián José Velásquez Figueroa, former security chief of Hugo Chávez, who at the end of 2022 were found guilty of money laundering in a trial in the United States, will receive their sentences on the next 17 of April.
Judge William P. Dimitrouleas, of the federal courts in Fort Lauderdale (40 kilometers north of Miami), established the day in a court document dated Monday.
First she, known as “Chávez’s nurse” will be sentenced and then he, according to the judge’s decision, who was originally going to have handed down the sentence on September 21 but delayed the date at the request of the couple’s lawyer.
On December 13, the trial jury found Díaz Guillén guilty of two of the three charges against him and Velásquez Figueroa guilty of all three charges.
Díaz Guillén, extradited from Spain last May, and Velásquez Figueroa, who suffered the same fate in October, were requested by the United States to respond to accusations of money laundering resulting from acts of corruption in Venezuela related to the exchange control system. .
Lawyers for the couple tried unsuccessfully to get Judge Dimitrouleas to accept the argument that the US government lacked “extraterritorial jurisdiction” in this case.
Both Díaz Guillén and her husband have dual Venezuelan-Spanish nationality and were very close to Hugo Chávez.
They are known as Chávez’s “nurse” and “bodyguard”, because she was part of his health team before being named national treasurer, a position she held from 2011 to 2013, and he was her head of security.
Apparently his relations with the current president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, are not so good, since in 2016 they settled in Spain and say they cannot return to the country.
Venezuelan businessman Raúl Gorrín Belisario, owner and president of the Venezuelan channel Globovisiónis wanted by the US justice system in relation to the same facts for which the Díaz-Velásques were tried.
According to his file on the list of fugitives from justice in the United States, Gorrín was charged on August 16, 2017 in the southern district of Florida with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and nine counts of money laundering.
The indictment alleges that Gorrín Belisario paid millions of dollars in bribes to two high-ranking Venezuelan officials—Díaz Guillén and Alejandro Andrade Cedeño, who was also national treasurer—to obtain the rights to carry out foreign exchange transactions at favorable rates.
In addition to making money transfers to the officials, Gorrín Belisario allegedly paid them expenses related to private jets, yachts, residences, championship horses, luxury watches, and a fashion line.
Former Venezuelan national treasurer Alejandro Andrade Cedeño, who before that position was Chávez’s bodyguard and had taken up residence in the United States after his death, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2018, which he began serving in February 2019, as agreed.
As part of the plea agreement, Andrade accepted the forfeiture of one billion dollars and the forfeiture of all assets involved in the corruption scheme, including real estate, vehicles, horses, watches, planes and bank accounts.
To conceal bribery payments, Gorrín Belisario made payments through multiple shell companies and allegedly partnered with others to acquire Banco Peravia, a bank in the Dominican Republic, in order to launder bribes paid to Venezuelan officials and proceeds from the scheme. .
Gabriel Arturo Jiménez Aray, also a Venezuelan, former owner of Banco Peravia in the Dominican Republic, was sentenced in the US to three years in prison in November 2019 for conspiracy to launder money.
With information from EFE
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