Two investigators of IBI Consultants in Washington, through the National University of Defense of the Pentagon, in the United States, revealed a five-year investigation, where they establish a relationship between more $10 billion of the government that Hugo Chávez left to Nicolás Maduro with illicit activities such as money laundering, illegal mining and even drug trafficking.
The report called “Maduro’s last resistance: Survival of Venezuela through the Bolivarian joint criminal enterprise,” exposes data compiled in more than 11 countries, in which falsified invoices, illicit purchases of assets, and inter-bank transfers were traced, linked to the Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA.
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Switzerland and even Hong Kong are included in the framework of the organization of money laundering.
The study, written by Douglas Farah and Caitlyn Yates , expresses that Maduro received collaboration from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC – for the deviation of millions of dollars from the Venezuelan government to ghost companies in tax havens.
The late President Hugo Chávez transformed the state oil company PDVSA into one of its main foreign policy tools, offering its subsidized fuel for infrastructure projects to its ideological allies.
In total, we identified 181 individuals and 176 companies operating in at least 26 countries, the sum of this criminal action is not known, but a recent investigation conducted by a consortium of Latin American journalists found that Venezuela extracted $28 billion of PDVSA dollars. We have tracked at least $10 billion in funds related to Venezuela that moved through this criminal network between 2007-2018,”
states the report.
Maduro inherited the operation in 2013, after Chávez died due to an alleged cancer, but, over time, oil prices and PDVSA production fell.
Such conditions forced Nicolás Maduro to depend even more on activities such as cocaine trafficking and the illicit production of gold. With the decline of PDVSA, the regime continues to operate as a criminal organization,”
revealed the study.
The data that were revealed by the researchers indicate that Nicaragua and El Salvador did not receive enough oil since 2010, however, they reported revenues of up to $400 million per year.
In Nicaragua, Albanisa, also a subsidiary of PDVSA, received some oil, but the funds received far exceeded imports. In the case of Albanisa, the money provided was between $400 and $600 million a year, in illicit funds during the last decade,”
they asserted.
The petitions as a result of the work of the investigators is that they look for measures of punishment on the part of the United States to each one of the allies of the Nicolás Maduro regime in commercial matter, because the damage is not only for the Venezuelan people, but also for a large part of the continent in criminal matters.