Federal authorities seize plane regularly used by Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro
Federal authorities seized a plane in South Florida Monday that is regularly used by Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, in an enforcement action stemming from violations of U.S. sanctions against his government and breaches of export control laws.
The plane, used by Maduro for personal and professional reasons, was flown from the Dominican Republic, where it had been detained, to the executive airport in Fort Lauderdale, authorities said. The seizure was a joint operation among the departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Commerce, among other federal agencies. Homeland Security Investigations was in charge of bringing the plane to the United States.
The plane is a Dassault Falcon 900EX, a French-built corporate jet, with blue and red stripes and a white body. It is valued at $13 million, according to the Justice Department. The plane has been documented previously visiting St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Cuba and Brazil, often with Maduro on board. The plane appears to be currently registered in the European republic of San Marino. The prefix on the airplane’s registration, T7, is the nationality mark for aircraft registered in the landlocked microstate within Italy.
The Justice Department said on Monday that individuals affiliated with Maduro had bought the plane using a shell company in the Caribbean, and used the purchase through the third country to hide the purchase and smuggle it into Venezuela. The small jet has “almost exclusively” flown to and from a Venezuelan military base over the last year and a half, the Justice Department said.
“Let this seizure send a clear message: aircraft illegally acquired from the United States for the benefit of sanctioned Venezuelan officials cannot just fly off into the sunset,” Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement Matthew S. Axelrod of the Department of Commerce said in a statement.
Dominican authorities assisted the United States in Monday’s operation. El Listin Diario, a Santo Domingo-based newspaper, had previously reported that Dominican prosecutors had detained a plane with a similar tail number at the international airport in the city of Higüero back in May.
The plane’s seizure represents the latest escalation in the tense relations between Venezuela and the United States, which have been exacerbated by the recent elections in which Maduro claimed victory despite widespread evidence from the political opposition and media analysis that the government’s results were fraudulent.
The plane’s registration in the United States was canceled in January 2023, according to public records from the Federal Aviation Administration, because it was exported to St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Records from the FAA show that a Florida-based company sold the plane to a Limited Liability Company there, but the St. Vincent and the Grenadine’s company registry records do not appear to have a company by that name.
it is unclear whether the Caribbean country’s government was aware of the sale of the plane to Venezuela. Grenadines’s Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves congratulated Maduro on his recent claimed electoral victory.
Not the first seized plane
Earlier this year, the U.S. government took possession of a Boeing cargo plane in the Miami area that had been sold by a sanctioned Iranian airline to a Venezuelan company in violation of federal export control laws, the Justice Department said.
The 747-300M plane, flown from Argentina to Miami in February, was owned by Mahan Air, an Iranian company targeted by the U.S. government for its support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, officials said.
The Islamic force is a branch of the Iranian military and designated by the United States as a terrorist organization. The Justice Department, with assistance from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, obtained a seizure warrant in July 2022 to confiscate the plane in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where it was grounded until the jet’s arrival at Miami-Opa-locka Executive Airport in Miami-Dade County.
Since 2008, the Department of Commerce has issued and renewed an order prohibiting Mahan Air from “engaging in any transaction involving any commodity exported from the United States.” Mahan Air violated that order in October 2021 when it sold the Boeing aircraft to the Venezuelan state-owned cargo company, Emtrasur, without U.S. approval. Further violations occurred when the Venezuelan cargo airline flew the plane from Caracas to Tehran and Moscow between February and May 2022, authorities said.
Over a half-billion dollars seized
Since targeting Venezuelan government corruption in 2017, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Attorney’s Office have seized more than a half-billion dollars in bank accounts — along with luxury real estate properties, show horses, high-end watches, expensive cars and a super-yacht.
The assets belonged to dozens of top Venezuelan government officials and business people who committed bribery and currency schemes involving the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, according to federal authorities.
Almost all of the defendants charged in South Florida have been convicted of laundering the tainted proceeds into the banking systems of the United States, Switzerland and other countries. A handful of others are still awaiting trial or have died while under indictment.
“The seizure of this aircraft is another significant action by Homeland Security Investigations working with our domestic and international partners against the illegal activities of the Maduro regime,” Special Agent in Charge Anthony Salisbury of Homeland Security Investigations Miami said in a statement, after federal authorities announced the seizure of the plane on Monday.
This story was originally published September 2, 2024 at 12:14 PM.
