Revealed: Juan Guaido used millions of looted dollars to asset strip Venezuela

[Judi Lynn]

John McEvoy
20th August 2021

On 3 August, The Canary exposed how Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó’s UK legal costs were paid with money appropriated from the Venezuelan state.

In an effort to access roughly US$2bn of Venezuelan gold held in the Bank of England, it was reported that Guaidó’s legal team drew on hundreds of thousands of dollars originally seized from the Central Bank of Venezuela in the US.

We can now reveal that this figure is significantly higher. According to official documents, Guaidó and his appointees have given over US$6.5m to powerhouse legal firms as part of a campaign to bleed the Venezuelan state of its foreign assets.

Almost all of this money was sent in a series of instalments to Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP – the legal firm representing Guaidó in the UK.

The firm appears to be tightly knit with the US foreign policy apparatus, and has over recent years represented a series of right-wing Latin American officials.

Remarkably, the documents also suggest that Guaidó has been paid over half a million dollars from this fund.

Looted dollars
In April 2020, the US government transferred US$342m of Central Bank of Venezuela assets to an account at the US Federal Reserve in New York. In a move denounced by the Venezuelan government as “vulgar plundering”, the money was then handed over to Guaidó’s ad-hoc administrative board of the Central Bank of Venezuela.

. . .

Guaidó and his appointees have also directed roughly US$100m of looted assets towards a secretive “Liberation Fund”. According to AP, opposition lawmakers used the fund during 2020 to “pay themselves $5,000 a month” while providing only $100 a month to doctors and nurses battling the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.

More:
https://www.thecanary.co/exclusive/2021/08/20/revealed-juan-guaido-used-millions-of-looted-dollars-to-asset-strip-venezuela/

Compare the "pile of hands" handshake with Argentina's Nestor Kirchner, Brazil's Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, and Venezuela's Hugo Chavaez!



The fascists' handshake looks like a pile of freshly sliced deli meat.