Venezuela’s former treasurer, Claudia Díaz, allegedly used looted funds and a shell company to buy gold bars valued at more than $9.5 million, according to court records obtained by the AP.
FILE - In this Sept. 24, 2018 file photo, Claudia Patricia Diaz Guillen, the former nurse of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, leaves the national court in Madrid, Spain, where she fought and won a case of extradition at Venezuela's request for alleged money laundering.
In quick succession a shell company established in the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines that she allegedly controlled purchased 250 gold bars valued at more than $9.5 million, according to court records from Liechtenstein obtained by The Associated Press. The bars, weighing a kilogram each, were allegedly stored at a private vault in the tiny European principality available to Díaz and her son after his 18th birthday.
Díaz was virtually unknown until she and her husband, a former security adviser to Chávez, appeared in 2016 in a dump of secret financial documents known as the Panama Papers, which provided a rare look at how some of the world’s richest people hide their money. Authorities raided the couple’s Caracas home and seized what they described as a collection of luxury cars, artwork, and documents related to real estate holdings inside and out of Venezuela.
According to the Liechtenstein court’s request, Beaumont was allegedly working with Danilo Diazgranados, a Venezuelan financier who generated attention in 2017 for owning the offshore firm that bought Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci’s hedge fund when he joined the White House. The court, in its request, said Díaz controlled Amaze through another Venezuelan woman, Norka Luque, who is identified as a friend of former Defense Minister Carmen Melendez and a “straw-woman” for various high ranking politicians and figures in Venezuela.” Efforts to locate Luque were unsuccessful.In 2018, they filed their own legal assistance request to Geneva accusing the French national of creating several shell companies to launder as much as $4.
Pieth said the actions undertaken by CBH appear similar to those by other Swiss banks that have recently been penalized for failing to combat corruption involving Venezuelan clients. In February, Switzerland’s financial markets regulator ordered Zurich-based Julius Baer to revamp its management of client advisers after finding 150 transactions over a nine-year period that pointed to “systematic failures” with Venezuela.
The gold bars allegedly belonging to Díaz represent just a small fraction of the total amount looted from Venezuela. But they stand as a powerful symbol of the boundless greed that fed a slew of intermediaries, from white-shoe boutique asset managers to some of Europe’s oldest banks.
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