COVID spreads on Miami-Dade County Commission as Joe Martinez tests positive
other officials in the stateowned oil company known as PDVSA from wealthy business people who in turn made highly profitable loan deals with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government .
Urdaneta, 47, who has been free on a $1.5 million bond since surrendering,
A second Miami-Dade commissioner tested positive for COVID-19 this week, as the virus continues to spread through the legislative body’s staff as well.
Joe Martinez said Wednesday he’s considering going to the hospital because of back pain following his diagnosis. He said he doesn’t think he caught it last week in the commission chambers, days before the commission’s chairman, Jose “Pepe” Diaz, tested positive.
Instead Martinez, who is vaccinated, thinks he contracted it from his wife, who was feeling ill before Martinez developed symptoms, tested positive this week and was not vaccinated.
“I think it’s a coincidence,” Martinez said of him and Diaz contracting the virus at roughly the same time. “I didn’t get near him.”
The Diaz results set off a testing blitz in the 200person staff that makes up the commission offices. The chairman’s office didn’t have a tally of COVID-19 test results, citing health confidentiality rules. Raquel Regalado, a commissioner who had COVID earlier in the year, said two staff members tested positive this week
faces up to 10 years in prison but might receive less punishment at his sentencing in September before U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams because of his cooperation. As part of his guilty plea to a single money-laundering conspiracy charge, federal prosecutors are seizing a $5.3 million condo in the Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, along with two apartments in Miami Beach and all assets in Urdaneta’s Swiss bank account.
In total, U.S. authorities have moved to take more than $49 million from Urdaneta that is traceable to his criminal activity of accepting bribes in exchange for providing access to lucrative Venezuelan government contracts such as business loans and currency trades, prosecutors Kurt Lunkenheimer and Paul Hayden said in court papers.
Urdaneta, who held various positions in the Venezuelan Ministry of
Oil from 1997 to 2015, was not only a central government player in the $1.2 billion money-laundering case filed in Miami but 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 moneylaundering 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 complaint. 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 alleged ringleader was Venezuelan Francisco Convit Guruceaga, who 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. He paid $600,000 to satisfy a forfeiture judgment and started his three-and-a-half-year sentence earlier this month.
In May of this year, 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, 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 face $12 million forfeiture orders, but court records reflect that the former PDVSA official only kept $3 million of that amount and Hernandez kept the rest. Prosecutors are targeting 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, Raúl Gorrín, who was charged in a separate money-laundering case in Miami and remains in Venezuela.