Former top lawyer in Venezuelan oil ministry gets 4 years in Miami money-laundering case
A former top lawyer of Venezuela’s oil ministry 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 exforeign official.
Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui played a central role in a $1.2 billion money-laundering scheme fueled by government corruption. 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 business loans that were made to Venezuela’s stateowned oil company, PDVSA, and were repaid with inflated returns through a lucrative government-controlled currencyexchange system during the administrations of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás 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 moneylaundering conspiracy, triggering his liability.”
Urdaneta’s defense attorneys, however, argued that he deserved a significantly lower sentence because of his assistance in both U.S. and foreign investigations of Venezuelan kleptocrats suspected of embezzling millions of dollars from the oil-dependent governments of Chávez 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.