Informant in top case accused of lying to feds

MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA » A key informant against one ofVenezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s closest aides has been accused of lying to his law enforcement handlers in a case involving millions of dollars transported on private jets in violation of U.S. sanctions, The Associated Press has learned.

The development could hurt the case againstOilMinister Tareck El Aissami, who the U.S. considers one of Venezuela’s most corrupt power brokers, giving oxygen to claims by the nation’s socialist elite that the U.S. is resorting to trumped-up charges to pursue its goal of regime change.

It also follows embarrassing revelations in another sanctions case in which a federal judge excoriated the same unit ofManhattan prosecutors targeting El Aissami for withholding exculpatory information about an Iranian businessman seen as a nexus in growing ties between the Islamic republic and Venezuela.

lejandroMarin, a Venezuelan-born pilot and businessman, was arrested Sept. 19 in Miami on three counts of knowinglymaking false statements to U.S. federal agents, according to court filings.

A swornaffidavit accompanying the Sept. 4 arrest order doesn’t mention Venezuela or El Aissami.

But it accusesMarin of lying about the equivalent of $140,000 that went missing from a package of 1.3 million euros in cash that he transported by private jet to the U.S. in July 2018 at the direction of federal law enforcement.

Marin, 46, runs a chartered flight business out ofMiami’s Opa Locka executive airport. He was signed up as a confidential source to help investigate then Vice President El Aissami and his alleged frontman, businessman Samark Lopez, according to an individual familiar with the case speaking anonymously to discuss the ongoing probe.

The Trump administration sanctioned both men as drug kingpins in 2017, seizing hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. bank accounts, two yachts, a private plane andMiami real estate it said were the illegal proceeds of cocaine shipments to Mexican cartels coordinated at the highest levels of Venezuela’s government andmilitary.

It later charged them with violating those same sanctions by allegedly using U.S.based charter companies to arrange private flights on American-registered aircraft to Russia, Turkey and inside Venezuela during Maduro’s 2018 presidential campaign, which the opposition boycotted amid allegations of fraud and vote-rigging.

Both men are on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 10 most wanted fugitives list. Both have denied any wrongdoing and Lopez even appealed unsuccessfully to the U.S. Supreme Court to try and block kidnapping victims of Colombian rebels from taking a $318 million chunk of assets frozen in the U.S. following his designation as a “drug kingpin” by the U.S. Treasury Department.

A former student activist schooled in radical politics by his father, a Druse Syrian-Lebanese immigrant, the 45-year-old El Aissami has risen steadily through the ranks of Venezuela’s redshirted revolution. Along the way he’s earned a reputation for ruthlessness but also pragmatism that stands in sharp contrast to his anti-imperialist sloganeering.