Miami feds charge two ex-Venezuelan prosecutors with taking bribes from PDVSA contractor
Two former Venezuelan prosecutors have been charged with accepting bribes of about $1 million from a contractor for the government’s state-owned oil company through a South Florida bank account, according to a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday in Miami.
In exchange for the alleged bribery payments five years ago, the then-senior prosecutors did not charge the contractor who did business with the national oil company, PDVSA, the indictment said. Over the past decade, PDVSA has been at the center of dozens of major foreign corruption cases filed in Miami and other parts of the country.
The indictment charges former Venezuelan prosecutors Daniel D’Andrea Golindano, 43, and Luis Javier Sanchez Rangel, 35, with one count of conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of accepting bribes derived from corrupt business dealings with the national oil company. Both defendants are in Venezuela and not in custody, so they can only be arrested if they surrender to U.S. authorities or leave the country and get picked up on a warrant.
The indictment was made public just as the Biden administration has been in talks on oil with the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro, who two years ago was indicted with others on drug-trafficking conspiracy charges by New York federal prosecutors. Heavy sanctions were also imposed on PDVSA in 2019.
The new case, probed by Homeland Security Investigations, alleges that the two prosecutors in the Venezuelan Attorney General’s Office were investigating a contractor suspected of corruption in his company’s dealings with a subsidiary of PDVSA. The unnamed contractor’s business with the state-run oil company totaled more than $150 million, according to the indictment.
D’Andrea and Sanchez discussed and agreed to receive bribes of about $1 million in exchange for not pursuing criminal charges against the contractor and others, according to the indictment filed by federal prosecutors Michael Berger and Alexander Kramer. The suspect in the indictment is identified as “Contractor 1.”
According to the indictment, D’Andrea arranged for a co-conspirator to create false invoices seeking payments for purported medical diagnostic equipment from “Contractor 1.” In turn, the contractor made a series of payments totaling about $1 million through a South Florida bank account to the two Venezuelan prosecutors in 2017, the indictment says.
The prosecutors opted not to seek criminal charges against the contractor and others, including an unnamed Venezuelan official, the indictment says. The prosecutors used the bribery payments for personal expenses, including purchasing an apartment and a car.
If they are convicted, the defendants face up to 20 years in prison for the money laundering conspiracy count and up to 10 years for each count of the bribery transactions.
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 5:16 PM.
