BREAKING: Venezuelan tycoons with close ties to the Maduro regime moved vast sums of public money out of the country - and banks in Europe and the US helped them do it.
Our #FInCENFiles investigation w @ArmandoInfo @UnivisionNews @MiamiHerald & more
icij.org/investigations…
The #FinCENFiles reveal $4.8 billion in suspicious transactions linked to Venezuela, nearly 70 percent of which involved public money.
“What happened was really the sacking of a country,” former anti-corruption prosecutor @MundarayZair told us
Construction mogul Alejandro Ceballos Jimenez secretly routed more than $116 million in public housing contracts to recipients including his family members.
Among the agencies that contracted him? An anti-poverty program called Mision Che Guevara
icij.org/investigations…
Banks in Europe, including Swiss lenders CBH & Julius Baer Group and the now-defunct Portuguese bank Banco Espirito Santo, played a pivotal role in facilitating the flow of money out of Venezuela.
Here’s Espirito Santo’s report on Ceballos:
documentcloud.org/documents/7212…
And big global banks, incl JPMorgan & Standard Chartered, enabled dubious Venezuelan $$ to flood the financial system by approving suspicious payments as correspondent banks.
Why are correspondent banks crucial in money laundering? Watch our explainer:
“Bankers were completely embedded in this scheme of looting the wealth of a nation,” said Martin Rodil, a consultant who advises the U.S. Treasury Department on Venezuela sanctions.
“Without the banks, this would not have happened.”
icij.org/investigations…
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