MIAMI — Leonardo González Dellán’s LinkedIn page promotes him as an entrepreneur and restaurateur. A 2019 U.S. Treasury Department sanctions notice called him something else: testaferro, a financial “frontman” hiding money for corrupt Venezuelan politicians.
To South Florida resident Alejandro Andrade, Venezuela’s treasurer during the Hugo Chávez presidency, he was an alleged enabler — a conduit for moving stolen money to the Alpine nation cherished by swindlers for its secrecy.
But to global financial giant Credit Suisse, González Dellán went by another moniker: client.
A leak of documents from Credit Suisse revealed how González Dellán was able to open and maintain multiple accounts while allegedly facilitating a fortune in bribes.
The leak laid bare the relationship between the Swiss banking institution and a variety of politically connected Venezuelans who were allegedly involved in plundering the nation’s once robust economy. The records point to a pillar of the Swiss financial sector that continued to serve the beneficiaries of fraud and corruption well after the practice was supposed to have been discontinued.
In a 2017 Florida plea agreement, Andrade acknowledged receiving more than $1 billion in payoffs from an assortment of characters, including González Dellán. Andrade raked in cash and enjoyed other perks paid for with the proceeds of corruption. These included private jets, yachts, cars, homes, show horses, and high-end watches.
Andrade was one of several Venezuelan elites targeted by federal prosecutors in South Florida. Miami and its surroundings have become a favored haunt for former Venezuela officials who looted their homeland before relocating to South Florida in search of a life of comfort and style.
The implosion of Venezuela’s economy, in part due to corruption and self-dealing by those like Andrade, has reshaped the city of Miami. Super-rich Venezuelans came to park their profits while others fled to Florida to escape a ruined economy.
Now we know a little more about the back story — specifically how Swiss banks became an important tool in stashing the profits of those who drained Venezuela’s wealth. The information comes from analysis of the records from Credit Suisse. The follow-the-money exercise helps illuminate how the cunning and corrupt left the oil-rich nation financially broken.
The system revolved around brokerage houses known as casas de bolsa — through which bolivars could be exchanged for dollars at a favorable rate. In many cases, the profits were then spirited out of Venezuela and into Swiss banks before ultimately being funneled into Miami condos, luxury cars and yachts.
Andrade, who landed in the South Florida community of Wellington, known for its lavish homes and private airplane hangars, was charged in federal court and copped a plea, forfeiting $1 billion and surrendering a slew of luxury assets. In a document from his prosecution, he acknowledged that “upon my request” co-conspirators transferred funds to multiple Swiss bank accounts, including one at Credit Suisse in the name of Malabar Services Inc.
The leaked data was provided by an anonymous source to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared it with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and 46 other media partners around the globe, including the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald. Reporters on five continents combed through thousands of bank records, interviewed insiders, regulators, and criminal prosecutors, and dug into court records and financial disclosures to corroborate their findings, producing dozens of articles under the banner Suisse Secrets. The data covers over 18,000 accounts that were open from the 1940s until well into the past decade. Together, they held funds worth more than $100 billion.
Savage years
The system was called the permuta (or “swap”), and it operated between 2003 and 2010. It was a time known as the “savage years,” a nod to the feeding frenzy that the permuta market unleashed among financial powerhouses — many of whom, like González Dellán, appear in the leak.
That period was also a time of human rights violations and a clampdown on Venezuela’s fledgling opposition movement.
While impunity reigned, large Swiss banks including Credit Suisse welcomed clients from Venezuela. The leak shows some Venezuelan customers of Credit Suisse held fortunes worth hundreds of millions in Swiss francs. A Swiss franc is currently worth slightly more than $1. Among those whose names were on the accounts were two alleged co-conspirators in a US$2.4 billion bribery scandal, several actors implicated in a US$700 million Ponzi scheme, and others accused of stealing the identities of at least 1,000 of their compatriots.
Credit Suisse declined to discuss individual clients or accounts. In a statement, the bank said it screens customers in line with industry standards to “identify and manage financial, regulatory and reputational risk, both at onboarding as well as in relation to existing accounts.”
The European Union has threatened to blacklist Switzerland as an abettor of money laundering.
Friends in High Places
These days, nobody answers the knock on the imposing, thick wooden door on the once-bustling 14th floor of the Cavendes building, a tower in Caracas’ financial district. Employees of a neighboring business said they hadn’t seen any activity at the office, the one where Credit Suisse once operated. A security guard offered that “these people have been gone for years.”
It wasn’t always so quiet.
González Dellán, who has not been charged with a crime, was once a major player at this bank, even though he was the kind of person who in banking circles would be considered a PEP, or “politically exposed person”: a client who represents a high risk of corruption and illicit dealings due to their influence and prominent public role.
Part of that was by virtue of family connections. His father, Eudoro González, was a senator, while González Dellán’s brother is currently a member of the Venezuelan legislature.
González Dellán made his own mark at Banco Industrial de Venezuela, one of the country’s oldest and largest state-owned banks, becoming vice president in 2000 before rising to president in 2002.
When he left the state bank after a decade in 2004, González Dellán became a director for a Venezuelan brokerage house, a casa de bolsa named Econoinvest Capital S.A.. His name lent the firm legitimacy. He served as a non-executive director of Econoinvest, which was later investigated and raided in 2010, and which also had an account at Credit Suisse.
On the author bio page for the web publication New Europe, González Dellán credits himself with helping “to grow the country’s phenomenally successful brokerage industry in the late 2000s.”
That was no idle boast.
Allegedly exchanging bribes for access, Dellán González made money for himself and for his clients in the industry he helped create. By 2012, he was a wealthy man. He became rich enough to move to London and marry a famous Italian-Venezuelan model, Aida Yespica. Their nuptials were held in Las Vegas.
Back home in Venezuela, the house of cards was collapsing. The casas de bolsa machinery that González Dellán helped pioneer, though profitable for insiders, was contributing to the slow but spectacular strangulation of Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy, an implosion that prompted an estimated six million Venezuelans to leave the country.
Venezuela’s loss was South Florida’s gain. One year after the 2008 crash, Venezuelans accounted for 17% of $6.2 billion in South Florida residential real estate purchases by foreign buyers, according to a Miami Association of Realtors study. Condos in the Brickell area were particularly popular with Venezuelans.
Tagged in 2019
While Andrade and some other high-profile Venezuelans in Miami were targeted by the Justice Department, González Dellán managed to avoid that fate. He has not been charged with a crime. But in 2019 he was included in a U.S. sanctions announcement alongside other prominent businessmen and businesses, many of them headquartered in Miami.
Sanctions, which are imposed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, part of the Treasury Department, serve to freeze assets and can lead to their seizure.
In addition to the sanctioned individuals, there were several businesses named, many of them locally based, a reflection of how Caracas and Miami had become intertwined.
Gustavo Perdomo, who had a $4 million-plus home in the ritzy Cocoplum section of Coral Gables, was sanctioned.
So was Raúl Gorrín, media mogul boss of Venezuela’s Globovision empire and the owner of at least 24 properties in Miami and New York. One of those properties was another home in Cocoplum, this one also worth in excess of $4 million. Gorrín was Perdomo’s brother-in-law and business partner.
Gorrín was already on the lam after a Miami grand jury charged him with paying hundreds of millions in bribes and committing money laundering by hiding embezzled government funds totaling more than $1 billion. He was also being investigated for allegedly misappropriating billions of dollars from Venezuela’s state-owned oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., better known as PDVSA. Gorrín and Perdomo’s spouses were also sanctioned.
The Miami-based businesses sanctioned included Globovision Tele CA Corp., RIM Group Investments Corp. and Magus Holding USA.
The measures were designed to make owners divest control of the corporations. They also sought to force individuals to take “concrete and meaningful actions to restore democratic order, refuse to take part in human rights abuses, speak out against abuses committed by the government and combat corruption in Venezuela.” The people named in the sanctions, though sometimes interconnected, were not the same individuals who came up in the leak of Swiss banking records.
Enter Credit Suisse
González Dellán held a number of Credit Suisse accounts starting in 2007.
He first shows up in June of that year. By October of that same year, the account held 8.3 million Swiss francs. By November of the following year, it had closed.
He appears again in the Suisse Secrets leak as opening an account in June 2011.
By May 2013, the leaked records show that his account held almost 11 million Swiss francs. The account was closed in October 2015.
The most interesting account bearing González Dellán’s name is an unusual mega-account, opened in June 2007, with more than 30 legal entities and 10 individual owners. They included:
— Luis Alberto Benshimol Chonchol. His Bencorp Casa de Bolsa C.A., which also appears on the account, was seized in Venezuela in 2010.
— Martin Lustgarten. As reported by the Miami Herald, Lustgarten is an infamous Venezuelan currency broker who caught a break when a technical misstep by U.S. prosecutors allowed him to escape a money laundering trial.
— Cedel International Investments, a firm belonging to banker Eligio Cedeño, a former political prisoner of the Chávez regime. Cedeño, a foe of Chávez who was jailed by the regime, told OCCRP and el Nuevo Herald that the account was opened without his knowledge for business purposes while he was in jail.
By the time González Dellán initiated any of those accounts, his status as a PEP would have obliged bankers to look more closely at the source of his finances.
A source with intimate knowledge of the bank’s operational model in Venezuela during the “savage years” told OCCRP that such clients didn’t represent a problem for Credit Suisse. In fact, the source said, the lender actively pursued customers either known or suspected of being testaferros. Law enforcement agencies have been told a similar story.
A Florida lawsuit
Although he wasn’t charged, González Dellán got tangled up in some odd litigation in Miami. That involved a federal suit filed by a Colombian who fled drug violence tied to the narco guerrilla group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The plaintiff was Antonio Caballero, whose kidnapped father died in FARC hands. The lawsuit sought access to González Dellán’s assets, which by then were frozen at Miami’s Sunstate Bank as a result of the OFAC sanctions. The suit alleges González Dellán’s bribes propped up the Venezuelan regime, which in turn helped the FARC traffic drugs into South Florida.
Caballero won his initial case, but González Dellán intervened to try to prevent the transfer of money to the plaintiff.
The parties remain in talks. Via lawyers, González Dellán declined to comment.
The peak, and the long descent
The year 2010 was Venezuela’s economic peak, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $400 billion. The descent was long and steep. By 2018, Venezuela’s economy had shrunk to one quarter of its former size. Oil exports peaked even earlier, in 2007. They would fall by at least 71% over the next decade. Inflation wiped out Venezuelans’ savings — at least for those who lacked access to the permuta markets while they operated. For those who had no access to Swiss bank accounts, financial life was grim.
“At the time, and even today, everyone in Venezuela is trying to protect their money,” said Marianella Perez-Majul de González, who along with her sisters, uncle and some friends lost about $300,000 in savings after the government took over the Maracaibo-based ABA Mercado de Capitales, Casa de Bolsa C.A. in 2010.
Their family, like many others, kept savings in dollars to get around stratospheric inflation in Venezuela. But after the government seized ABA, they had trouble accessing their investments.
ABA was headed by Enrique Auvert Vetencourt, another South Florida transplant. Reached in Miami, he insisted he too is a victim, one who has lost everything, although the Swiss leak would show four corporate accounts in the names of three of ABA’s leadership.
Asked about that, Auvert said he believed the accounts were established mostly at the request of customers.
He said the reason customers were trying to get their money out of ABA and into Switzerland was the Chávez government’s tightening grip, and eventual near dismantling of the country’s financial markets.
“The big fear wasn’t what was happening in ABA, it was what was happening in the Venezuelan financial sector,” Auvert said in a lengthy interview. “It is perfectly normal for people to get their money abroad [and out of Venezuela].”
A free man, a crippled country
Venezuela is still paying the price for the predations of elites who plundered the country.
But Alejandro Andrade has caught a break.
He walked out of a federal prison in Pennsylvania on Feb. 16, 2022. Andrade earned a significant reduction in his sentence for helping prosecutors build cases against others. His Miami attorney, Michael Diaz Jr., confirmed he will serve parole “but we’re not exactly sure where he is ultimately going to be residing.”
Diaz declined to discuss Andrade’s connections to González Dellán.
“I wouldn’t be permitted to tell you that,” he said. “That’s something that’s confidential information.”
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