Swiss banker who helped Miami feds in Venezuelan corruption case freed from prison
A Swiss banker who helped guide U.S. prosecutors and agents through a maze of corruption extending from Venezuela to Europe to South Florida was released from prison on Tuesday after a federal judge drastically reduced his sentence to one year and three months — the time served since his incarceration in the summer of 2021.
Matthias Krull, 48, was initially sentenced to 10 years in prison for his supporting role in a billion-dollar Venezuelan money-laundering case in Miami that has been in the global criminal spotlight since it was filed in 2018.
However, in a rare concession, Krull received two significant sentence reductions — first to three and a half years and then on Monday to time served — from U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga after prosecutors twice recommended substantially less time behind bars. In her latest decision, Altonaga went far beyond the recommendations of prosecutors and even his defense attorneys, citing the “extent of his cooperation” and other factors.
Krull’s attorneys, Oscar S. Rodriguez and Jeffrey Neiman, issued a statement thanking the judge, prosecutors and others involved “in the process” for allowing him to return to his “beloved family” in the Miami area.
Krull’s release from the Federal Correctional Institution in Southwest Miami-Dade County coincided with the start of a separate corruption trial this week involving Venezuela’s former national treasurer, Claudia Díaz Guillen, and her husband, Adrian Velásquez Figueroa, in Fort Lauderdale federal court. They’re accused of accepting more than $100 million in bribes from politically connected Venezuelan businessmen who were given lucrative contracts to conduct highly profitable foreign-currency exchange trades for the government.
In Krull’s case, prosecutors lauded the Swiss banker’s assistance in the foreign corruption case implicating Venezuelan kleptocrats accused of stealing massive sums from their government and moving the tainted money to Europe and South Florida.
Krull has been credited with helping prosecutors and Homeland Security Investigations obtain plea deals from two other defendants in the $1.2 billion money-laundering conspiracy case — a Miami money manager and a former Venezuelan government oil official, according to court records. He also helped connect prosecutors in Miami with bankers in Switzerland and other European countries to collect valuable information about Venezuelan money-laundering schemes around the globe.
So far, four of the nine defendants in the Venezuelan case — which entailed sham loans made to the state-run oil company that were repaid with money washed through the government’s favorable currency exchange systems — have pleaded guilty in Miami federal court. The rest are considered fugitives in Venezuela or other parts of South America.
Krull was mistakenly believed to be the ringleader of the group because he was the first to be arrested while he was traveling through Miami International Airport in July 2018. But the reality was far different. While he was a well-connected Swiss banker operating in Panama and Venezuela, he was brought into the money-laundering scheme late in the game to help move hundreds of millions of dollars from Europe to the United States — a task that he and his associates never completed.
Although he was never compensated for his supporting role in the scheme, Krull was ordered to pay $600,000 as financial punishment as part of his initial 10-year prison sentence, now drastically reduced.
This story was originally published November 30, 2022 at 2:00 PM.
