Miami (EFE).- The former national treasurer of Venezuela Claudia Patricia Díaz Guillén and her husband, Adrián José Velásquez Figueroa, were sentenced this Wednesday in the United States. money laundering.
In addition, they must restitute 136 million dollars and pay a fine of 75,000 dollars each, according to an announcement by Judge William P. Dimitrouleas in Miami.
The Prosecutor’s Office had requested sentences of no less than 23 years and 5 months in prison for her and 19 years and five months for him.
The two Venezuelan citizens were extradited from Spain, a country of which she also has nationality, in 2022 and in December of that same year they were found guilty of money laundering: she on two charges and the one on three.
Díaz Guillén and Velásquez Figueroa are considered trusted persons of Hugo Chávez -known as the “nurse” and the “bodyguard” of the president of Venezuela who died in 2013- and they settled in Spain in 2016, they allege, because they were persecuted by the current Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.
Linked to a network of corruption
The Prosecutor’s Office accused them of having made a fortune of 136 million dollars with a corruption network that took advantage of the fact that she was national treasurer (2011-2013) to benefit from the exchange control system in force in Venezuela at that time.
That is the amount that, according to Judge Dimitrouleas, they must repay, in addition to paying a $150,000 fine between the two.
In a brief incorporated into the judicial record of the case, the former national treasurer of Venezuela asked the judge for “compassion” when imposing a sentence and stressed that she would have liked to “collaborate” with the United States. but could not do so due to lack of information that it was required.
Díaz Guillén and her husband pleaded not guilty to the charges against them and did not reach an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, as did, on the contrary, another Venezuelan, former national treasurer and subject to US justice, Alejandro Andrade Cedeño, involved in the corruption and bribery plot than they.
Andrade Cedeño, who took up residence in the US after Chávez’s death, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018, as part of a deal that included $1 billion in asset forfeiture.
Raúl Gorrín Belisario, key file
The main defendant in this case, the Venezuelan businessman Raúl Gorrín Belisario, owner and president of the Globovisión channel, is wanted by the US Justice in relation to the same facts.
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), another of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and nine more of money laundering.
The indictment alleges that Gorrín Belisario paid millions of dollars in bribes to two high-ranking Venezuelan officials – Díaz Guillén and Andrade Cedeño – 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.
To hide the bribes, Gorrín Belisario made payments through multiple shell companies and allegedly partnered with others to acquire Banco Peravia in the Dominican Republic.
Also Venezuelan Gabriel Arturo Jiménez Aray, former owner of Banco Peravia in the Dominican Republic, was sentenced in the US to three years in prison in 2019 for conspiracy to launder money.