Former Executive Director of the Swiss Bank Julius Baer Matthias Krull was sentenced to 10 years in the United States after he confessed to complicity in the laundering of illegally appropriated funds belonging to the Venezuelan oil and gas company (PDVSA).
Mathias Krull, a German citizen who lived in Panama, admitted his guilt in August that he had been involved in a scheme since December 2014, the purpose of which was to misappropriate about $600 million belonging to PDVSA through bribery and fraud in currency exchange transactions. By 2015, this amount reached $1.2 billion. Financial crimes were committed in the United States. Krull admitted that he used real estate in Miami and complex schemes of false investments to hide the origin of the funds, Wall Street Journal reports.
The court decided to confiscate 600 thousand dollars from Krull and pay a fine of 50 thousand dollars.
The Venezuelan crisis leads to a thriving corruption environment that “manages the flow of criminal proceeds through South Florida,” prosecutors said in a complaint filed in July as part of an ongoing investigation that led to a conviction against Krull.
Prosecutors called the region”an international money laundering center and a desirable destination for wealthy foreign criminals and kleptocrats.”
The fraudulent scheme started in 2014, but Krull himself joined it in 2016, he admitted when his alleged accomplice contacted him to launder the proceeds of a foreign currency embezzlement scheme linked to funds from PdVSA.
According to investigators, Krull and his accomplices to launder the funds used located in the United States dummy company.
