The corruption scheme around the powerful former Venezuelan Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami continued this April 29, with the beginning of the process of seizure of assets by the Venezuelan authorities.
The announcement was made by the prosecutor of Nicolás Maduro's regime, Tarek William Saab, who stated that the seizure process also involves Samarkk José López, a Venezuelan businessman accused of money laundering and who is also on the most wanted list in the United States, and Simón Zerpa, former Minister of Economy and Finance and former president of the National Development Fund.
The controversial William Saab, the judicial enforcement arm of Maduro's dictatorship, also recalled that El Aissami, Zerpa and López were accused of treason, appropriation of the Venezuelan treasury and orchestrating a criminal financial operation "with the enemies of Chavismo" to destabilize the country.
In particular, El Aissami is accused of embezzling $23 billion from the state-owned oil company PDVSA.
Prosecutor Saab confirmed that the investigation is still ongoing and said that more details of the corruption that embezzled PDVSA will be revealed soon.
Likewise, he commented that the crime of El Aissami and his accomplices was detected between October and December 2022 because, at the time, the money did not enter the coffers of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV).
Days before, the dictatorship's own prosecutor had accused El Aissami, a former Chavista hierarch, of having a "fleet of airplanes" at his disposal "to do his crazy things," referring to his criminal activities.
Chavismo going after its children
The PDVSA corruption scheme around El Aissami is proof of the internal fragmentation of Maduro's regime, since the former Oil Minister, one of the most important positions in the country, was one of the most powerful men in Venezuela for years. He was the right hand of Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez.
However, everything changed last year for El Aissami, who resigned from his previous position and remained missing throughout 2023 until, finally, the regime announced his arrest and indictment.
"We have achieved the unveiling of the direct participation and the consequent arrest of Tareck El Aissami, detained to be presented and charged by the Public Prosecutor's Office in the next hours," Prosecutor Saab told the press when the arrest was announced. "The objective of this mafia, headed by Tareck El Aissami, was none other than to implode the national economy, destroy our currency by pushing up the parallel dollar and make the economic policies promoted by the Executive fail."
El Aissami was not only a high-ranking member of Chavismo but also a man directly linked to drug trafficking networks and the terrorist organization Hezbollah, being the key connection between Venezuela and Lebanon.
In fact, for his links to drug trafficking and transnational crime, El Aissami is part of the most wanted list in the United States, which singled out the former minister for drug trafficking in 2017.
This is how the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) describes it: "In February 2017, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Tareck Zaidan El Aissami, a Venezuelan national, as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker (SDNT) under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act for playing a significant role in international drug trafficking."
