In addition, they must restitute 136 million dollars and pay a fine of 75,000 dollars each.

The former national treasurer of Venezuela Claudia Patricia Díaz Guillén and her husband, Adrián José Velásquez Figueroa, were sentenced this Wednesday in the US to 15 years in prison and three years of probation each, on charges of money laundering.

In addition, they must restitute 136 million dollars and pay a fine of 75,000 dollars each, as ruled by Judge William P. Dimitrouleas in the Miami courts.

The Prosecutor’s Office had requested sentences of no less than 23 years and 5 months in jail for her and 19 years and 5 months for him.

Dimitrouleas, after an hour of listening to the arguments of the parties, said that he “understood the family circumstances of the convicted” – parents of two children – but that in his opinion they had established “a sophisticated money laundering system” that made them deserving of the sentence.

The couple, each accompanied by their lawyer, received the sentence in a court in downtown Miami where they had arrived in handcuffs, with a simple light-colored prison suit and assisted by simultaneous translation.

Both Venezuelan citizens were extradited from Spain, the country of which they also have nationality, in 2022 and in December of that same year they were found guilty of money laundering: she on two charges and the one on three.

Díaz Guillén and Velásquez Figueroa were trusted people of Hugo Chávez – they are known as the “nurse” and the “bodyguard” of the president of Venezuela who died in 2013 – and they settled in Spain in 2016.

The Prosecutor’s Office accused them of having made a fortune of 136 million dollars with a corruption network that took advantage of the fact that she was national treasurer (2011-2013) to benefit from the exchange control system in force in Venezuela at that time.

Prosecutor Paul Hayden insisted on his last argument before the judge to get the maximum sentence that the two convicted men used a sophisticated money laundering system to break the law in the United States, in addition to requesting that they return the 136 million dollars.

ACCORDING TO THE LAWYER, THEY DID NOT ROB FROM THE PEOPLE OF VENEZUELA

Díaz Guillén’s lawyer, Marissel Descalzo, responded in her speech to indicate that the 136 million dollars were in no case “robbed from the people of Venezuela.”

Velásquez Figueroa’s lawyer, the American Andrew Feldman, said that from his point of view, US regulations were never violated, since those convicted limited themselves to executing bank transfers between countries “without violating the law.”

In a brief incorporated into the judicial record of the case, the former national treasurer of Venezuela asked the judge for “compassion” when passing sentence.

Feldman told EFE that the sentence “is not what they expected” and that his client is “very sad”, although he added that he listened to the decision with integrity.

“Hopefully the sentence can be reduced in some way,” he said, after recalling that now there is a 14-day period to appeal.

Descalzo told EFE that in his opinion the sentence is “unfair” and takes “too many years” for what they expected, but stressed that the appeal work begins today.

He also pointed out that after this sentence the children of the couple are left helpless in Spain “without the possibility of seeing their parents in 15 years.”

According to the lawyer, there is no official record in which it can be verified that the couple took over the 136 million dollars and that they imagine that this “does not exist.”

Díaz Guillén and her husband pleaded not guilty to the charges against them and did not reach an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, as did, on the contrary, another Venezuelan, former national treasurer and subject to US justice, Alejandro Andrade Cedeño, involved in the same plot.

Andrade Cedeño, who took up residence in the US after Chávez’s death, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018, as part of a deal that included $1 billion in asset forfeiture.

The main defendant in this case, the Venezuelan businessman Raúl Gorrín Belisario, owner and president of the Globovisión channel, is wanted by the US Justice in relation to the same facts.

Also Venezuelan Gabriel Arturo Jiménez Aray, former owner of Banco Peravia in the Dominican Republic, was sentenced in the US to three years in prison in 2019 for conspiracy to launder money.