The laundering plot linked to Plus Ultra operated from Mauricio

In addition, the network, also under the focus for supposedly to wash the embezzlement of the program promoted by Nicolás Maduro to provide food to the local supply and production committees (CLAP), would have had access to privileged information For its economic operations and created a company in Isla Mauricio “to hide its activities.”

This is what the French justice warned, specifically the National financial parquet (PNF), to the Prosecutor’s Office of Geneva when he requested legal cooperation in 2024.

Illegal sales of gold

Three years before, in October 2021, the Helvetic authorities had opened their own investigation after receiving a notice from the agency responsible for combating money laundering in Switzerland, Money Landering Reporting Office Switzerland (MROS, for their acronym in English), which there were detected suspicious operations in bank accounts of the country.

Already then pointed to money movements linked to “acts of corruption and/or embezzlement of public funds possibly committed in Venezuela.” And that the same financial structure, with societies and bank accounts based in Switzerland, would also have been used to introduce into the Legal economic system funds from “potentially illegal sales of gold” of the Bank of Venezuela.

This is stated in the documentation consulted by ABC, which reveals that the Geneva Prosecutor’s Office directs for these facts an investigation against four people: a woman of French nationality, who responds to the initials MB and appears as owner of a mercantile, Osaka Group Sàrlwhose corporate purpose, according to the Mercantile Registry, is to “provide, both to individuals and companies, all services and advice related to the organization and planning of administrative tasks”; its ex -husband LB; the brother of the latter and a fourth individual established in Geneva. A crime of aggravated capitals are attributed to all, collected in the Swiss Criminal Code.

The investigations suggest that the four investigated would have agreed to establish “financial frames used” to bleach the funds through commercials and accounts based in Switzerland as well as through “transfers of important financial flows, even through companies located in companies located Several countries » – among them Spain and France-« and managed by interposed people ».

“South American people”

Some of these transfers, according to the Prosecutor’s Office of Geneva, “benefited people from different nationalities (in particular, South American), and were destined to invest” very high “sums in various kinds of assets,” with great discretion. “

Although the investigation took impulse in 2024 when France informed Switzerland of his advances and warned that the same plot was immersed in “large -scale” laundering activities, with which “people under international sanctions” would have also been benefited.

In his case, it had been a year earlier, in December 2023, when the authority of the financial markets, an independent public body responsible for ensuring the proper functioning of the markets, warned the Justice Gala that two individuals on the network « They had organized important financial flowswithout any economic logic »and that in recent years they had obtained” important profits “with” particularly opportunistic operations. ” It is believed that they had access to privileged information on a regular basis.

The report sent by the French authorities also revealed that the plot -“to hide its activities” -had used a financial intermediary based in Isla Mauricio and, with the same purpose, had created there in 2020 a company that supposedly “lent wide Patrimonian management services »and” transfers and payments. ”

Already in 2024, both the Prosecutor’s Office of Geneva and the French financial parquet went to the Spanish Anti -Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to request cooperation. The first agency, to practice a record in a domicile in Mallorca by a person linked to the criminal organization; while the second, to request the own in homes located in Madrid and Tenerife.

It was then that the analysis of the information sent by both countries led to anti -corruption to file a complaint with the National Court last October. The same criminal organization based in France and Switzerland was also operating in Spain, “allegedly constituted by foreign, nationalized Spanish people” and, at least, a Madrid lawyer.

Likewise, the plot of money laundering, linked to the sale of gold from Venezuela and washing funds allegedly embezzled by officials of the Bolivarian Republic around the Clap program, reached such «wingspan» -The anti -corruption prosecutor said, which with its activities had produced a fraud to the State, because there had been an” improper use “of the 53 million euros received by the airline Plus Ultra by granting of the Council of Ministers of Ministers of Ministers of Ministers of March 9, 2021.

The suspicion is that the money would have been used “to launder amounts of illicit origin”, since in the documentation provided the company “appears as a signatory and beneficiary of some alleged loan contracts with three companies of the criminal organization, involved in Gold sales ». The theory is that these contracts gave coverage, in turn, to the “corresponding returns” that Plus Ultra, “in consecutive dates to the reception of public aid”, made accounts abroad of societies that are part of the alleged criminal organization

In the brief presented by anti -corruption, the sale of gold was also denounced due to the amount of some 30 million euros to a mercantile of Arab Emirates by the society that had granted the aforementioned loans and the remission of quantities by the same company to another company with account in Panama.

Despite the Criminal Chamber of the National Court, the complaint did not admit the complaint to understand that the crime of money laundering denounced is outside its jurisdiction. He then argued that the illicit would have occurred in Venezuela and “only tangentially” the “improper use” of Spanish public aid was mentioned in the writing. Now the Anti -Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, as this newspaper already reported, studies whether to inform the facts to the Madrid Court that has already investigated the rescue grant.

“Reinforced” signs

Meanwhile, in Switzerland the Geneva Prosecutor’s Office tries to clarify the activity of the company Osaka Group Sàrl and the City Court of Justice has rejected on January 8 the appeal presented by the French citizen MB against the blockade of its accounts, By understanding that there are sufficient indications against him and the measure is justified: the investigated would have received three suspicious transfers for a total amount of 2.7 million euros between 2019 and 2020; There is an exchange of mails, intervened in the records, which would reveal an alleged coordination with the rest of the involved; and also is behind the management of real estate in France with links with the plot.

The magistrates also point out that the information provided by the French justice in 2024 has “reinforced” also the indications against them. Both MB, which maintains that it acted in the “total ignorance”, and the other three investigated were interrogated by the Geneva Prosecutor’s Office between 2022 and 2023 and all denied the facts.