Miami Man Pleads Guilty to Sending $1 Million in Bribes to Ecuadorian Oil Officials
The U.S. government recently launched a campaign to crack down on money laundering and corruption in Latin America's state-run oil companies, including the one in Venezuela.
Now the target has moved a bit south and west. A Miami man yesterday pleaded guilty to trying to funnel more than $1 million to an official at Petroecuador, Ecuador's state-run oil company. The feds say José Larrea, age 40, and another Miamian, Frank Roberto Chatburn Ripalda, hatched a scheme to wire money between multiple U.S. bank accounts in order to win government contracts in Ecuador. Larrea, a financial adviser, also allegedly falsified documents on behalf of an oil contractor working with Petroecuador. Larrea is the fourth person to plead guilty as part of the scheme. (Chatburn has pleaded not guilty, and his case remains open.)
This past April, federal prosecutors said Chatburn sought out Larrea's help in funneling money to an unnamed Ecuadorian official in order to make sure his company, GalileoEnergy S.A., retained some lucrative government contracts. The feds say Chatburn and Larrea several years ago helped Petroecuador officials set up shell accounts to receive bribes. Then, from 2013 to 2015, prosecutors said, Chatburn and Larrea repeatedly wired money from various accounts, including from banks in the Cayman Islands, to the officials' shell accounts.
The feds listed six instances in which Chatburn and Ripalda allegedly wired money from the Caymans to both U.S. and Panamanian shell accounts. In multiple cases, the feds say, the money passed through "intermediary companies" in Miami. In one case, Chatburn and Larrea sent nearly $650,000 to a bank account "held in the name of a law firm based in Miami, Florida." (The law firm isn't named in court documents.) In November 2014, the feds say, the co-conspirators met at an unnamed Miami restaurant to discuss how the bribery scheme was turning out.
Read more: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-man-guilty-of-bribing-ecuadorian-oil-officials-10725063
