MIAMI — A former top lawyer of Venezuela’s oil ministry who played a central role in a $1.2 billion money-laundering scheme fueled by government corruption was sentenced to more than four years in prison by a Miami federal judge Thursday — punishment that was less than half of what prosecutors sought for the ex-foreign official.
Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui, the former legal counsel for Venezuela’s Ministry of Oil and Mining, was convicted last year of accepting tens of millions of dollars in bribes and investing some of his illicit payments in a Sunny Isles Beach high-rise condo 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, 48, is the fourth defendant to be sent to prison in the massive money-laundering conspiracy case. It centers around private business loans to Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, that were repaid with inflated returns through a lucrative government-controlled currency exchange system during the administrations of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
Five other defendants in the Miami case, which was filed in 2018, remain fugitives in Venezuela and other South American countries.
Urdaneta, who sneaked across Venezuela’s border with Colombia before surrendering to U.S. authorities in Miami in 2020, had been free on a $1.5 million bond. Last 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.
But at his court hearing Thursday, prosecutors were not willing to give him a break for his assistance, saying he deserved the maximum term of 10 years under sentencing guidelines.
“A sophisticated public servant, with a law degree, should have rejected the temptation of bribery,” federal prosecutors Kurt Lunkenheimer and Paul Hayden wrote in a sentencing memo. “Instead, the defendant placed himself in a pervasive corrupt money-laundering conspiracy, triggering his liability.”
Urdaneta’s defense attorneys, however, argued that he deserved a significantly lower sentence because of his assistance in U.S. and foreign investigations of Venezuelan kleptocrats suspected of embezzling millions of dollars from the oil-dependent governments of Chavez and Maduro.
“Since voluntarily escaping Venezuela at significant risk to himself and his family, Mr. Urdaneta has cooperated extensively with, and provided substantial assistance to, the United States government as part of multiple ongoing federal criminal investigations and/or proceedings,” his attorneys with the law firm Kobre & Kim wrote in a sentencing memo, recommending “substantially” less than the maximum of 10 years. The “scope of Mr. Urdaneta’s cooperation with the government has been extraordinary.”
As part of Urdaneta’s plea agreement, U.S. authorities seized a $5.3 million condo in the Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, along with two apartments in Miami Beach and all of his assets in a Swiss bank account. In total, authorities have moved to $49 million from Urdaneta that is traceable to his criminal activity of accepting bribes in exchange for providing access to Venezuelan government contracts such as PDVSA business loans and currency trades, prosecutors said.
Urdaneta, who held various positions in the Venezuelan Ministry of Oil from 1997 to 2015, was not only a key government player in the $1.2 billion money-laundering case filed in Miami, but he also had a supporting part in another loan and currency scheme earlier in his career, according to a factual statement filed with his plea deal.
The case’s main money-laundering conspiracy began in late 2014 with a sham loan to PDVSA that was repaid through a government currency-exchange scheme — siphoning $600 million from the state-owned oil company’s coffers, according to a criminal affidavit. The defendants used an associate to launder a portion of the PDVSA funds in the United States.
By 2015, the conspiracy had doubled to $1.2 billion embezzled from Venezuela’s national oil company, the affidavit says. Meanwhile, the associate became a key cooperating source for Homeland Security Investigations, including recording conversations in undercover meetings with some of the defendants. He has not been charged in the Miami case.
The accused ringleader was Venezuelan Francisco Convit Guruceaga. Convit is accused of plotting with Urdaneta, other officials at PDVSA and influential business people with access to the highest levels of government.
Convit’s defense attorney, Adam Kaufmann in New York, has declined to comment while his client remains in Venezuela.
Since 2018, federal prosecutors and Homeland Security Investigations have moved to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in bank and real estate assets belonging to the nine defendants named in the Miami money-laundering indictment and a related case.
The first was Venezuelan banker Matthias Krull, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder some of the PDVSA money secreted away in European bank accounts. Krull paid $600,000 to satisfy a forfeiture judgment and is serving a 3 1/2-year sentence because of his extensive assistance to federal prosecutors.
In 2021, Abraham Edgardo Ortega, a former executive director of financial planning at PDVSA, was sentenced to two years and four months after he admitted accepting more than $12 million in bribes that were secretly wired to U.S. and other financial institutions. Ortega also cooperated with prosecutors.
Ortega, who served as PDVSA’s top financial officer from 2014 to 2016, admitted that he conspired with the leader of the money-laundering ring, Guruceaga.
Ortega also said he collaborated with a Miami-based investment broker, Gustavo Adolfo Hernandez Frieri. Hernandez pleaded guilty to accepting $12 million from Ortega to invest in fake mutual funds in the United States so that the transactions looked legitimate, prosecutors said. Hernandez was sentenced to nearly four years.
Ortega and Hernandez each faced $12 million forfeiture orders, but court records reflected that the former PDVSA official only kept $3 million of that amount and Hernandez kept the rest. Prosecutors have targeted Hernandez’s New York City residence and a Miami home as substitute assets for his forfeiture order.
Some of the so-called Venezuelan kleptocrats charged in the indictment with Ortega and Hernandez have connections with Venezuelan President Maduro, who is a suspect in the ongoing investigation, according to federal law enforcement sources familiar with the case.
Maduro’s three stepsons are also under investigation, along with a wealthy Caracas TV mogul, Raul Gorrin, who was charged in a separate money-laundering case in Miami and remains in Venezuela.
