The network that looted PDVSA gave a million-dollar apartment to a Miss Venezuela

The model who represented Venezuela at the 2007 Miss World pageant, Claudia Paola Suárez Fernández, received a substantial gift from the network that looted $2 billion from her country’s main state-owned firm, the oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA).

The businessman Luis Mariano Rodríguez Cabello, the alleged frontman of the ring, gave the beauty queen a $996,000 apartment in the Parque Residencial Campo de Oro residential building in Caracas in 2010, according to a confidential report from the Financial Intelligence Unit of Andorra (Uifand) to which EL PAÍS has had access.

Through an instrumental Panamanian company (without any real activity), the alleged frontman for the corrupt organization transferred the money to an account at Bank Sarasin and Co in Switzerland belonging to the Venezuelan couple who sold the property. Rodríguez Cabello sent the money on February 11, 2010, from one of his accounts at Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA), a bank in the European microstate of Andorra that was selected by the network to conceal the money looted from the Venezuelan state oil company. The tiny country of 78,000 inhabitants was shielded until 2017 by banking secrecy. “I am attaching the support for the transfer of $950,000 for the purchase of a property for Mrs. Claudia Suárez,” Rodríguez Cabello indicated by email in April 2010 to a senior manager of the Andorran financial institution, according to the documents.

This is just the latest case of alleged corruption to emerge from a long-running investigation into the activities of the PDVSA ring. Formed by over 30 former officials of the powerful state firm — including several loyalists of deceased former president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), such as Nervis Villalobos and Javier Alvarado, his former vice-ministers of Energy — the network that looted PDVSA devised an elaborate scheme through which it received under-the-table commissions of up to 10% from businessmen. The firms that paid the bribes — especially Chinese companies — were later awarded energy contracts. To mask the trace of the money, the organization hid its loot through an opaque web of accounts at BPA, more than 4,000 miles away from Caracas. The flow of funds circulated through 30 companies, which were registered in Switzerland and Belize. BPA itself was raided in 2015 by Andorran authorities for allegedly engaging in money-laundering activities for criminal groups.

Investigators in Andorra, where a court has been probing 30 members of the PDVSA ring since 2018 for money laundering, were surprised that Rodríguez Cabello paid the amount for the apartment yet the sales contract only shows Suárez Fernández as the buyer. “It is suspicious that Highland [front company] ordered the transfer, yet neither this company nor Rodríguez Cabello’s names show up in the sales contract,” said a confidential Uifand report dated November 2022.

The sales document is signed by the Venezuelan couple who owned the apartment and by Claudia Paola Suárez. The document established a price of 5,795,000 bolivars, which at the exchange rate on that date would be worth $1.3 million. This newspaper has tried without success to reach the model and the apartment sellers for comment.

Miss Venezuela’s connection with the ring that looted PDVSA does not end there. Suárez Fernández opened an account at BPA in March 2009 in order to make a deposit of one million dollars, as this newspaper revealed. At the time, the model then informed the bank that she had a business relationship with the companies High Rise and Red Bouquet, controlled by another member of the plot, Diego Salazar, cousin of Rafael Ramírez, a former Chavista energy minister, former president of PDVSA and former ambassador to the United Nations. And in the Know Your Client procedure that banks are obligated to perform to check the origin of clients’ funds, Suárez Fernández indicated that she wanted to make quarterly transfers of $500,000 whose origin lay in “insurance” and “administration.”

Luxury skyscrapers in Miami

An analysis of the financial operations by Rodríguez Cabello in Andorra, where he moved over $1.1 billion between 2007 and 2015, reveals that the network’s main operator resorted to his opaque financial web to acquire a $5.3 million luxury apartment in the One Thousand Museum skyscraper in Miami in 2014.

Designed by the late Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, famous for works such as the London Aquatics Center, the Miami property is part of a 62-story building with 100 “six-star” residential units, a rooftop helipad, glass elevators, a pool and a solarium, among other amenities listed on the Miami Residential website.

To acquire the property, Rodríguez Cabello ordered two transfers worth $2.1 million in 2014 from his financial network at BPA to a Bank of America account in the name of Chicago Title Insurance, according to the documents. The sale contract was signed on October 12, 2014.

In 2019, Rodríguez Cabello managed to avoid an extradition request made by Venezuelan authorities to Spain. The active financial operator, who is accused of corruption, was not the only member of the ring to be seduced by the architectural excellence of this exclusive Miami building that has attracted the attention of celebrities such as David Beckham, who acquired a penthouse in 2020 for $18 million, according to Vanity Fair. Diego Salazar, now in serving time in a Venezuela prison for corruption, also bought a $15.3 million property in the One Thousand Museum in 2014 through the holding company Worldwide Traders Line.

An Andorran court has been investigating the colossal looting since 2015. Diego Salazar was prosecuted in 2018 for money laundering in a banking establishment. And, along with him, the oil company executive Francisco Jiménez Villarroel is also facing charges in Andorra; as are the company’s former lawyer Luis Carlos de León Pérez; the Venezuelan insurance magnate Omar Farías and Rodríguez Cabello himself, among others.

In 2018, the justice system of the European microstate also prosecuted a dozen former directors of BPA, the financial institution chosen by the corrupt plot to hide its loot and which was intervened in March 2015 for allegedly acting as a launderer of funds for criminal groups.

investigacion@elpais.es

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition