Banker pleads guilty in $1.2 billion Venezuelan-Miami money laundering scheme

Jay Weaver
4 min read
0

A European investment manager accused of laundering millions of dollars through Miami’s banking system that prosecutors say was stolen from Venezuela’s government in a vast corruption scheme pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court.

Luis Fernando Vuteff, 53, was convicted in Miami of playing a supporting role in a money laundering conspiracy involving an illicit windfall of $1.2 billion for about a dozen politically connected businessmen, bankers and Venezuelan officials — including five who previously pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.

Vuteff admitted in his plea agreement that he conspired with others to move hundreds of millions of dollars in embezzled Venezuelan government funds to European banks and then transferred $9.5 million of the tainted money to Miami accounts and other parts of the United States. His compensation: more than $4 million in fees paid through a commercial real estate company in Spain, according to factual statement filed with the plea agreement.

Luis Fernando Vuteff
Luis Fernando Vuteff

Vuteff now faces up to six years in prison at his August sentencing before U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami federal court. But Vuteff could eventually see his sentence reduced if he fulfills a cooperation deal struck between his defense lawyer, Brian Bieber, and prosecutors with the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to court records, Vuteff collaborated with another European banker, Ralph Steinmann, who has been charged in an indictment but has not been extradited from Switzerland like Vuteff because Steinmann is a Swiss citizen.

Vuteff, an Argentine man who is the son-in-law of a prominent political opponent of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, was arrested in Switzerland and extradited to the United States in August 2022.

Initially, a criminal complaint accused Steinmann and Vuteff of conspiring with others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from a corruption scheme involving the payment of bribes to senior Venezuelan officials of the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, who approved lucrative loan contracts for elite businessmen close to Maduro’s government.

The profits from those deals were washed through favorable government currency trades and yielded windfall fortunes for the so-called kleptocrats between 2014 and 2018, the complaint says.

Both Steinmann and Vuteff used European and U.S. banks to move millions from the corruption scheme to line the pockets of at least three Venezuelan public officials, including the oil ministry’s general counsel, Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui, according to the complaint by Homeland Security Investigations. It was filed by former Assistant U.S. Attorney Kurt Lunkenheimer and Justice Department trial attorney Paul Hayden.

Urdaneta was sentenced to more than four years in prison in 2022 by a federal judge in Miami. Urdaneta, the former legal counsel for Venezuela’s Ministry of Oil and Mining, was convicted of accepting tens of millions of dollars in bribes and investing some of his illicit payments in a $5.3 million Porsche Design Tower condo in Sunny Isles Beach and other real estate in the Miami area.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams imposed a $35,000 fine as part of Urdaneta’s sentence along with approving the feds’ seizure of $49 million worth of assets, including his luxury condo and Swiss bank account.

Urdaneta sneaked across Venezuela’s border with Colombia before surrendering to U.S. authorities in Miami in 2020. The following year, he pleaded guilty to a single money-laundering conspiracy count while providing insider information about corruption in Venezuela and tainted proceeds hidden in South Florida bank accounts and real estate investments — including incriminating information about Steinmann and Vuteff, according to sources familiar with the probe.

In 2021, Urdaneta’s colleague, Abraham Edgardo Ortega, the former executive director of financial planning at PDVSA, was sentenced to more than two years in prison after he admitted accepting more than $12 million in bribes that were secretly wired to U.S. and other financial institutions in Miami. Ortega also cooperated with prosecutors.

And last year, a former general counsel of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company pleaded guilty to accepting more than $11 million in bribes for his supporting role in the government racket. Alvaro Ledo Nass, a lawyer who also served as secretary of PDVSA’s board of directors, was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay back the bribery money to the U.S. government as part of his punishment. Williams, the federal judge, called the foreign corruption conspiracy “a cancer that acts like a virus.”

Five other defendants in the Miami case, initially filed in 2018, remain fugitives in Venezuela, other South American countries and Europe.

An unindicted co-conspirator in this case, Caracas TV mogul Raul Gorrin, has been separately charged in another Miami federal indictment stemming from the alleged embezzlement of Venezuelan government funds Gorrin, including tens of millions invested in the Miami area’s luxury real estate market. Gorrin, considered a fugitive, is living in Venezuela.

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