A former Venezuelan treasurer and nurse to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is contesting criminal charges in the U.S. She is accused of taking at least $4.2 million in bribes and gifts for green lighting lucrative currency transactions.
FILE - Claudia Patricia Diaz Guillen, the former nurse of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, leaves the national court in Madrid, Spain, Sept. 24, 2018. Diaz and her husband are the first former Venezuelan officials to fight criminal charges in the U.S. in a trail that kicked off late Nov. 2022, in south Florida. – For years, as the U.S. has ramped up pressure on Venezuela’s socialist government, dozens of allegedly corrupt insiders have raced through the U.S.
Like Diaz, Andrade, a former presidential security officer, leveraged a personal connection with Chavez to rise through the ranks of the army and the Venezuelan state, amassing a huge fortune almost overnight. In exchange for signing off on the bogus deals, Gorrin and others would pay Andrade’s expenses, which involved everything from a $40,000 payment to a former girlfriend, a hi-tech security system for a Caracas home and a $14,000 bill for a veterinarian taking care of his horses.
He also acknowledged having only minimal contact with Diaz, could produce no written record of bribes paid to her or the deal they allegedly cooked up for the treasury to continue funneling foreign currency contracts to Gorrin.
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