In this story the dates are important. At least, they explain the steps of the former Corporate Manager of Loss Prevention and Control of the state-owned PDVSA, Rafael Ernesto Reiter Muñoz, when his bureaucratic godfather and former president of the oil company, Rafael Ramírez, was ousted by Nicolás Maduro. With the same secrecy that he moved for years, Reiter prepared his retirement thanks to a complex financial plot that begins in Venezuela and reaches the remote Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Without even turning 40 and as if it were an early retirement plan, Rafael Reiter and his partners created a scheme to ensure that a Venezuelan company, a contractor for PDVSA itself for which Reiter worked, would channel its income around the world to through several offshore companies, known as offshore in financial jargon. This follows from the Pandora Papers, the massive leak of more than 11.9 million documents from 14 offshore service providers in tax havens, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with more than 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries, including Armando.info.
Rafael Reiter's career as Loss Prevention and Control Manager at PDVSA began in 2005. His past as a nightclub doorman in Las Mercedes, the pink zone of Caracas, was not sufficient accreditation for a similar responsibility in which he was still then the largest company in South America. But the connections and endorsement of his mother were enough, Marla Muñoz Olivo, a leftist militant who was secretary of Nicolás Maduro in the National Assembly (AN) and who, according to Social Security data, still works in the Venezuelan parliament -although He also assisted Rafael Ramírez in both the Ministry of Petroleum and the Foreign Ministry.
From the back room of financial power in a country that was swimming in petrodollars, Rafael Reiter cultivated privileges and relationships in the almost ten years he held the strategic position. He almost always went unnoticed until in 2017 he was definitively linked to massive corruption cases in PDVSA, aired in judicial investigations in several countries.
In August of that 2017, for example, he was pointed out in a court in Houston, Texas, in the same case that points to former Venezuelan officials such as Nervis Villalobos, César Rincón and Alejandro Istúriz, for the collection of bribes in exchange for favoring payments and contracts. from PDVSA to Zulian businessmen Roberto Rincón and Abraham Shiera, who pleaded guilty before the US authorities. As a result of this case, he was requested for extradition and arrested in October of that same year in Spain.
Before Rafael Reiter had sounded like part of the cast in the famous case of the briefcase with 800,000 dollars that Guido Antonini Wilson took from Caracas to Buenos Aires in 2007 for the presidential campaign of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, an example of the type of committed and covert actions that he was not only doing it for his corporate boss but for the government of Hugo Chávez. In July 2014, he was one of the few officials who had the arguable honor of receiving at the foot of the tarmac the former director of military intelligence, Hugo El Pollo Carvajal, who was then landing in Venezuela after his brief detention in Aruba, an island nation that fulfilled a request from the United States. And a few months later, when the fall from grace of the almighty Rafael Ramírez seemed inevitable, but without completely abandoning that security agent profile, Reiter became a businessman.
In September 2014, Maduro undermined Ramírez's power by removing him from the oil sector and appointing him, first, as Minister of Foreign Affairs and, three months later, in December, permanent representative of Venezuela to the United Nations (UN) in New York, semi-final stopover before his current exile in Italy.
Between the two appointments, in October 2014, Rafael Reiter registered the company Inversiones RC 58 Inc in Panama together with one of Chavismo's favorite financiers, Frenchman Charles Henry Du Bosq De Beaumont, and Said Aurelio Cabrera Abraham, a former army officer, owner of Plymouth Overseas Limited in Venezuela and Panama, a company with which he sold security systems to PDVSA. Months later, in December of that same year, Reiter founded the Grupo RT Consultants firm in Caracas, dedicated precisely to location services for people, data and assets, information protection, satellite location of vehicles, installation of GPS systems, armor for vehicles and rental of armored cars, among others.
During the months that followed until the first half of 2015, just before buying a house in Barcelona, Spain, for 1.15 million euros, Reiter put together the sophisticated financial structure that the Pandora Papers now bare.
Offshores are forever
A letter dated December 12, 2014 and addressed to the Asiaciti Trust law firm, one of the 14 that serve as a source for the Pandora Papers leak, was the starting point in Rafael Reiter's offshore plans. That letter was signed by the Venezuelan lawyer Alexis Hurtado Saravia and attested to the honesty and "correct behavior" of Reiter himself and those who would ultimately be his partners: Cristian Figueroa Sans, Fernando Figueroa Sans and Fernando Taranto Núñez.
A short time later, the Panamanian branch of the Asiaciti Trust law firm -whose headquarters are in Hong Kong- was in charge of formalizing the financial structure. In a matter of months, Reiter, Fernando Taranto and Cristian Figueroa became owners of Uniplexon Group Ltd, in Barbados, an island in the northeastern Caribbean. That company ended up, on the one hand, taking over the IESV Corporation, a PDVSA contractor since 2014, and at the same time it was controlled by Septra Foundation, a trust or trust registered in the Cook Islands -an archipelago of the South Pacific- of which Reiter and Figueroa they each own 40%, while the remaining 20% belongs to Taranto.
The IESV Corporation had been created in September 2013 with headquarters in Maturín, Monagas state, an oil entity in eastern Venezuela. From the beginning, its majority shareholder was Cristian Figueroa. Barely a year later, in September 2014, the company obtained, through direct contracting from PDVSA, an agreement for the “service to wells with a continuous tubing unit” in the “eastern region of PDVSA Servicios Petroleros SA”. The documents reveal that this first contract offered the company fees of 3.6 million dollars and another 6.3 million bolívares, these equivalent to 120,000 dollars at the Sicad II exchange rate in force at that time.
Rafael Reiter was still an employee of PDVSA and was not listed as a partner of Corporación IESV, but the documents contained in the Pandora Papers leave no doubt about his connection to the company. From the beginning, the offshore architecture would have as pivot the business of that PDVSA contractor. Another letter, dated April 9, 2015, established that once the company was created in Barbados and the trust in the Cook Islands, “eventually, Mr. Cristian Figueroa will contribute all the shares” of Corporación IESV. This transfer in favor of Uniplexon Group Ltd, the company registered in Barbados, finally materialized in February 2017.
The maneuver then turned Rafael Reiter into a beneficiary of the business of the PDVSA contractor, while the IESV Corporation was protected by the bilateral investment protection agreement signed between Barbados and Venezuela, as a shield against any expropriation or government measure against the company.
In addition to the 2014 contract, Corporación IESV reached other agreements with the oil company between 2015 and 2018, according to the National Registry of Contractors (RNC) and in a catalog available on the company's website. “Five continuous years of operations with our main client PDVSA SA”, refers to a brochure, which also details activities carried out for the “well cleaning and stimulation service” in the east of the country.
Neither company representatives nor Cristian Figueroa himself answered the requests for interviews. Fernando Taranto was also searched for but could not be located; in one of his home and office addresses in Caracas they reported that he has lived in Spain for several years. "I have transferred the questions sent to my client and we will analyze the opportunity and feasibility of answering, given that there are judicial procedures", answered Rafael Reiter's lawyer in Spain, Nelson De Souza Vilela. At the closing of the edition of this report, the answers had not arrived.
Simultaneous to this corporate structure, Rafael Reiter also prepared a similar scheme to protect family assets. Another trust in the Cook Islands, named Lantag Foundation, registered on February 18, 2015 with the purpose of "protecting assets and succession planning", ended up controlling all the shares of Wegyn Financial Corp, created weeks before in the Virgin Islands British.
According to the documents of the Pandora Papers, the objective of Wegyn Financial Corp was "to open an investment account in Panama" with funds of "business" origin from the management of "industrial machinery for cleaning oil wells in Venezuela." In addition to Reiter, his wife, Vanesa Carolina Yssea, appears as beneficiary in the Lantag Foundation trust, who was also arrested in Spain at the time of her and is the owner of at least three companies in that country.
Reiter's partners also replicated, each, that offshore asset protection scheme in which a trust domiciled in the Cook Islands owns a British Virgin Islands company whose funds come from the activity of cleaning oil wells in Venezuela, the same work that PDVSA contracted with Corporación IESV since 2014.
movie investor
Although the documents revealed now insist on the oil business to explain the origin of his fortune, doubts about how Rafael Reiter obtained resources are contained in the judicial files that authorities from the United States, Spain and Portugal have against him. The accusation of the Court of the Southern District of Texas in Houston, of August 2017, is a compendium of the irregular handling with which Reiter benefited for years in the shadow of Rafael Ramírez.
In Reiter's case alone, the court specified that between 2012 and 2013 he received at least three wire transfers totaling $580,000 into a relative's bank account; and that he also obtained from the businessmen Roberto Rincón and Abraham Shiera, as sumptuous gifts, two armored cars valued at 107,500 dollars each, a bag of 10,300 dollars for a family member, payment for a few days of vacation in June 2013 in a luxury hotel on the island of Aruba, off the coast of Falcón state in Venezuela, and a condominium in the Four Seasons hotel complex on Brickell Avenue in Miami, for which a payment of $867,619 was made. The accusation even mentions that Reiter ordered Rincón to invest 1.5 million dollars in his name in the production of a film.
When they were arrested in Spain, in October 2017, Reiter and his wife justified the purchase of the luxurious house they own in Barcelona, with resources they had in bank accounts in Italy and Florida as a result of the "supposed sale of a property in Miami by 4,350,000" dollars, according to the case file, cited by the Spanish electronic media Okdiario.
After spending eight months in detention in Spain, Reiter was released on parole, although he must appear in court once a month. An extradition request to the United States still weighs on him, which was agreed by the plenary session of the Criminal Chamber of the National High Court, but the Spanish authorities decided to postpone the procedure until he is judged by the investigation that Spain is carrying out on money laundering. capital from PDVSA corruption schemes and that involves other former officials, such as Nervis Villalobos or Javier Alvarado, among others.
As if that were not enough, the name of Rafael Reiter is also in the Portuguese justice investigation into the bankrupt Banco Espírito Santo (BES) and the funds that companies like PDVSA channeled through that financial entity, in exchange for bribes for officials who decided deposits. In the case, the names of businessmen Roberto Rincón and Abraham Shiera are repeated as responsible for paying bribes using bank accounts. "In February 2013, Rafael Reiter, as director of internal security services at PDVSA, supervising the regularity of contracts with Bariven's suppliers, received USD $500,000 in the Safeleader account at the ESBD," reads one of the pieces of the voluminous file.
Safeleader Investments Ltd is a company registered in the British Virgin Islands by the Panamanian law firm Alcogal, another of those involved in the Pandora Papers. The file of the Portuguese prosecutor's office details that it was constituted by Paulo Murta, former director of the BES, but falsely attributed to Samark López Bello, considered by the United States as the figurehead of Tareck El Aissami.
At 43 years old, Rafael Reiter awaits in Spain, perhaps with the same secrecy with which he acted for a decade in PDVSA, for the decision of the justice of that country and his possible extradition to the United States. From his time in power, he still has a string of offshore companies that he knew how to put together just when the fall of his protector, Rafael Ramírez, was approaching.
(*)José María Irujo, from the Madrid newspaper 'El País', collaborated with this story from Spain.
