For years, federal prosecutors in Miami have charged dozens of Venezuelan officials, businessmen and other so-called kleptocrats with collectively stealing billions of dollars from their oil-rich nation and diverting windfall fortunes into South Florida’s banks and real estate market. With the exception of fugitives still at large, all of the Venezuelan defendants have cut plea deals to avoid long U.S. prison sentences, including former national treasurer, Alejandro Andrade, who served under the late socialist president, Hugo Chávez. He pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge in South Florida five years ago. For prosecutors, winning has been fairly easy, partly because they’ve never had to prove their cases in court. But a case set to begin Monday shapes up as a new test for federal prosecutors targeting foreign officials accused of corruption. Andrade’s successor as treasurer, Claudia Díaz Guillen, will be going to trial along with her husband. She will become the first former Venezuelan official to face U.S. criminal charges<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For years, federal prosecutors in Miami have charged dozens of Venezuelan officials, businessmen and other so-called kleptocrats with collectively stealing billions of dollars from their oil-rich nation and diverting windfall<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-public-safety"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}