Court allows extradition to Miami of ex-treasurer with ties to Hugo Chávez
Spain’s National Court consented Friday to the extradition to the United States of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez’s former nurse, who is charged in Miami with money laundering.
The court’s magistrates “consider that all requirements are met” for the extradition of Claudia Diaz to proceed, the court said in a statement.
The court rejected Diaz’s arguments against extradition that she is being investigated in Spain on the same charges and that she obtained Spanish nationality last April.
The magistrates ruled that the Spanish investigation does not cover the same allegations, saying the U.S. investigation is much broader, and that factors that might prevent extradition of a Spaniard are not in question.
Diaz and her husband, Adrian Velasquez, a former security adviser to Chávez, have been living in Madrid, where they were briefly arrested in 2018 on a Venezuelan warrant. But Spain’s supreme court rejected Venezuela’s extradition request, finding the couple could be tortured if they returned home.
In the Miami case, Diaz is accused of taking bribes from a billionaire media mogul to green-light lucrative currency transactions when she served as Venezuela’s national treasurer.
She and her husband are accused of taking at least $4.2 million in furtherance of the bribery scheme, according to the charges presented last October. The payments came from companies and bank accounts located in Switzerland to the couple’s accounts in Miami.
Behind the payments, according to prosecutors, was businessman Raul Gorrin, owner of the country’s last major private TV network, Globovision.
Gorrin was placed on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s most-wanted list after being charged for his alleged role in a $2.4 billion money-laundering conspiracy in 2017.
U.S. prosecutors have charged dozens of Maduroconnected officials and businessmen as part of a campaign to root out corruption plaguing the oilrich South American nation.
As much as $300 billion is estimated to have been raided from Venezuela’s state coffers in two decades of socialist rule.