Miami’s $1 billion Venezuelan money-laundering case grows

A massive money-laundering case centered on the alleged theft of more than $1 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company has expanded with new charges accusing a pair of financial-asset managers with helping move bribery payments into Miami bank accounts and real estate for Venezuelan government officials.

Newly charged in the

Miami conspiracy case: Ralph Steinmann, 48, of Switzerland, and Luis Fernando Vuteff, 51, of Argentina.

Steinmann is at large, according to U.S. authorities. Vuteff, who is the sonin-law of a prominent political opponent of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, was recently arrested in Switzerland and awaits extradition to the United States.

A criminal complaint alleges that Steinmann and Vuteff conspired with several others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from a bribery scheme involving senior Venezuelan oil company officials accused of approving lucrative loan contracts for elite businessmen close to Maduro’s government. The profits from those deals were washed through favorable government currency trades and yielded windfall fortunes for the so-called kleptocrats between 2014 and 2018, the complaint says.

Both asset managers used European and U.S. banks to move millions from the corruption scheme to line the pockets of at least two Venezuelan public officials, including the oil ministry’s general counsel, Carmelo Urdaneta Aqui, according to the Homeland Security Investigations complaint. It was filed by federal prosecutors Kurt Lunkenheimer and Paul Hayden.

Urdaneta, 48, was sentenced to more than four years in prison last month by a federal judge in Miami.