Mexico Probes Dozens for Alleged Money Laundering With Venezuela
Mexico Probes Dozens for Alleged Money Laundering With Venezuela
(Bloomberg) -- Mexico’s financial crimes unit chief is seeking money laundering charges against a total of 25 firms and people allegedly involved in sending food to a government-aid program in Venezuela.
The criminal complaints against the companies and people were filed with Mexico’s attorney general’s office, Santiago Nieto, head of the Mexican Finance Ministry’s financial intelligence unit, said in an interview. “I presented three accusations,” which brought the total of firms and people to 25, he said, declining to comment further on an ongoing investigation.
Venezuela’s food-aid program, known as CLAP, has a virtual monopoly on subsidized food in the South American country. Mexico has accused companies of using its ports to ship low-quality food to Venezuela through CLAP, where it’s marked up more than 100% before being sold to starving people in the country.
In October, the Mexican attorney general’s organized crime division announced a $3 million fine for companies shipping food to Venezuela to settle accusations of price gouging. They were to pay the fine to the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, as part of an agreement the shippers reached with the attorney general’s office. The head of the division at the time, Alonso Israel Lira, provided only the first names of five individuals who were part of the deal. Key details of the settlement, including the full names of the companies and their top executives, remain sealed under court order.
Nieto declined to identify the companies or people targeted in the requests for criminal prosecution, nor would he say whether any of them were companies covered in the settlement last year.
As of April, food bound for the CLAP program has been flowing from Veracruz, Mexico, into the port city of La Guaira, near Caracas, according to shipping documents. Much of the food continues to come from the same Mexican companies that supplied past shipments. It’s unclear whether any of these companies has been implicated in Nieto’s accusations.
Companies have netted some $700 million of government food contracts since late 2016, fulfilled largely with food from a network of related suppliers in Mexico, Luisa Ortega, the former attorney general of Venezuela, said in an interview earlier this year.
Ortega fled Venezuela for Colombia in late 2017 after publicly criticizing the Maduro government and being fired. She’s since continued to investigate the Venezuelan food programs from Bogota with several prosecutors who also left Venezuela.
In 2018, Ortega traveled to Mexico to lobby the attorney general’s office there to investigate food exports to Venezuela. A few months later, the office’s organized crime division announced the fines for companies shipping food to Venezuela to settle accusations of price gouging.
To contact the reporters on this story: Nacha Cattan in Mexico City at ncattan@bloomberg.net;Michael Smith in Miami at mssmith@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Juan Pablo Spinetto at jspinetto@bloomberg.net, Robert Jameson
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