MIAMI — A federal choose in Miami handed down a 15-year jail sentence Wednesday to the previous nurse of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for taking bribes from a billionaire media mogul to green-light profitable foreign money transactions when she served as Venezuela‘s nationwide treasurer.

Claudia Diaz and her husband, Adrian Velasquez, had been each discovered responsible in December by a jury of 5 of the six counts detailed in a 2020 indictment accusing them of taking thousands and thousands of {dollars} in bribes. Velasquez additionally was sentenced Wednesday to fifteen years.

The U.S. Justice Department has aggressively investigated corruption in Venezuela’s socialist authorities, making the most of the United States’ distinctive place because the vacation spot of alternative till not too long ago for insiders to stash their ill-gotten beneficial properties.

But Diaz was the primary former senior official to truly struggle fees. The lengthy sentence handed right down to each her and her husband - the stiffest ever handed down in opposition to so-called Venezuelan kleptocrats - displays their determination to reject a plea deal provided by the federal government as is customary in legal instances.

“I agree with the government that the defendants drastically changed their life” from a middle-class existence to one among a number of jets and yachts, Judge William Dimitrouleas stated as Diaz and Velasquez listened in full silence. “They made a lot of money.”

The couple additionally should forfeit $136 million in money and belongings, which represents their take from the cash laundering conspiracy. Attorneys for the couple stated they intend to enchantment.

Judge Dimitrouleas rejected prosecutors’ request that she be locked away for greater than 23 years, maybe persuaded by a last-minute enchantment from the couple’s two minor youngsters. On the eve of the sentencing, the couple’s 14-year outdated son submitted a letter to the court docket describing how his dad and mom had been whisked away and extradited from Spain, the place the household had been dwelling, and his hope that he wouldn’t develop up and not using a dad or mum.

“My parents were sent to Florida, United States, so quickly that I felt they had been taken hostage,” David Velasquez Diaz wrote in a letter to Judge Dimitrouleas on behalf of himself and his youthful brother.

According to the indictment, Diaz and Velasquez obtained funds from corporations managed by their co-defendant, fugitive Venezuelan media mogul Raul Gorrin, to accounts in Miami allegedly used to pay for the couple’s in any other case unexplained lavish way of life.

The authorities’s case relied closely on the testimony of one among Diaz’s predecessors as treasurer, Alejandro Andrade, who took the witness stand to testify that the kickback scheme he struck with Gorrin continued underneath Diaz.

Like Diaz, Andrade, a former presidential safety officer, leveraged a private reference to Chávez to rise by the ranks of the military and the Venezuelan state, amassing an enormous fortune virtually in a single day.

In 2021, he was launched from jail after serving lower than half of a 10-year sentence for his function in an enormous scheme to siphon thousands and thousands from state coffers. As a part of his plea settlement, he forfeited greater than $260 million in money and belongings, together with an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion, luxurious automobiles, show-jumping horses and several other Rolex and Hublot watches.

The trial befell as usually hostile relations between the US and Venezuela are beginning to ease after the Trump-era coverage of “maximum pressure” to take away President Nicolás Maduro has stalled.

Recently the Biden administration loosened crushing oil sanctions in opposition to the OPEC nation, permitting U.S. oil firm Chevron for the primary time in additional than three years to renew manufacturing to help fledgling negotiations with the opposition.

But ongoing legal investigations in opposition to Venezuelan insiders stay carefully watched in south Florida, dwelling to thousands and thousands of Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans fleeing leftist rule of their homelands.

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