The National Customs Directorate, the National Anticorruption Secretariat (Senac) and the Money Laundering Prevention Secretariat (Seprelad), revealed documentary inconsistencies in the case of the Iranian-Venezuelan plane that transported cigarettes from Tabacalera del Este SA of the Cartes group to Aruba .
The most striking was the invoice issued by Tabesa presented to the Customs of our country for the sale of tobacco. In it, he reported that the amount of the operation was around US$777,444, but the invoice presented to Aruba Customs was US$1,202,045. This yields a difference of US$424,601.
According to René Fernández, head of Seprelad, one of the hypotheses is that the plane would have transported sums of money within a money laundering scheme with the excuse of importing and exporting cigarettes.
Federico Hatter, head of Senac, affirmed for his part that the invoice in question, issued by Tabacalera del Este SA, also has other irregularities. He informed that there are two similar invoices, presented to the Customs of Paraguay and Aruba but that they differ in some data. For example, in the invoice presented to the Paraguayan Customs by Tabesa they have numbers that are not present in the invoice delivered to the Aruban Customs. Another irregularity is that air transport was recorded as the means of transport, but it was delivered in Aruba as a means of river transport. Another piece of information that does not coincide is that the dates of the operation are different.
BUZARCHIS
Salyn Buzarquis, a national senator for the PLRA, affirmed that he does not see a firm and real decision by the Prosecutor’s Office on this case to investigate this or other facts that link the Cartes group. “Obviously, the security agencies were anesthetized long ago. Three days the plane was parked without anyone saying anything. Finally the alert jumps when it jumps in Argentina and not in Paraguay. There was evidently complicity of several institutions”, she commented.
CONTEXT
A Venezuelan-Iranian flight arrived in our country in mid-May to carry a load of 7,000 cigarette packs for G. 6,000 million from the tobacco company Tabesa de Horacio Cartes.
It is precisely the Aerocargo del Sur Transport Company (Emtrasur) and the flight made by the Boeing 747-3B3M aircraft of said airline between May 13 and 16, 2022 at the Guaraní airport in Minga Guazú.
The same plane was stranded for lack of fuel in Buenos Aires three weeks later, on June 8. His destination was initially Montevideo, but the Uruguayan capital denied him descent due to the warning from the United States that it was a plane manned by alleged members of the Quds Forces, a powerful elite paramilitary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran (IRGC), considered terrorist by the United States.
