Venezuelan Businessman Sued With Money Laundering Gunned Down
Venezuelan businessman Leonardo Santilli was gunned down on Tuesday by a motorcycle assassin in Venezuela, officials said.
Santilli was charged with money laundering in Miami due to laundering millions of dollars from oil contracts.
The Venezuelan businessman died from several gunshot wounds in what police said as a possible professional hit.
Reports said the businessman was inside his car in a parking lot outside a pharmacy on the seaside city of Lecherias, which is east of Caracas.
The assailant approached the vehicle on a motorcycle around five in the afternoon.
Witnesses said the assailant fired as many as eight times at Santilli before leaving on the motorcycles, said the reports.
People at the scene tried to help the Venezuelan businessman and took him in his vehicle to a hospital before he died.
Santilli was charged in Miami in March for playing a role as a broken-in nearly $150 million money-laundering scheme.
This involved oil contracts with the Venezuelan government under President Nicolas Maduro.
According to the filed criminal complaint, five subsidiaries of the state-owned oil company sent the money to his two South Florida businesses to buy equipment and other supplies for them in 2014-2017.
Santilli spent about one-third of that money on actual goods for the PDVSA subsidiaries.
He then diverted the rest through South Florida bank accounts to himself, his family members, Venezuelan government officials, and national oil company executives.
Federal prosecutors Michael Nadler and Michael Berger have charged over a doze Venezuelan businessman and government officials over the past four years.
The charges include stealing billions of dollars from PDVSA through inflated contracts, sham loans, and currency-exchange schemes.
Many business people, with Santilli included, have been charged with setting up companies and bank accounts in Miami to steer millions in bribes to state oil company executives and others.
Prosecutors acquired warrants from a federal magistrate judge to freeze 17 bank accounts controlled by Santilli and his two companies in the Miami area.
The total take from these was nearly $45 million.
The U.S. attorney's office refused to comment on Santilli's death. Still, it is expected to seize his bank assets in Miami and continue investigating the PDVSA subsidiaries in Venezuela.
Earlier in March, reports said that prosecutors detailed millions of dollars in bribes Santilli allegedly paid officials at the joint ventures to win the contracts.
Emails, bank records, interviews with confidential witnesses, and some PDVSA officials acknowledged receiving bribes.
U.S. authorities since then unearthed "wide-scale corruption" since opening the investigation.
Former PDVSA general counsel Edoardo Orsoni and Petrocedeño's ex-procurement chief Lennys Rangel reportedly took bribes from a contractor who ran several companies to exchange awarding business to them.
Orsoni and Rangel both appeared before Miami federal court on March 12. They both pleaded not guilty and were released on bond.
Reports said that Rangel agreed to take over $5 million in return for awarding Petrocedeño contracts to Florida contractors.
Meanwhile, Orsoni also agreed to receive cash for directing Petrocedeño, which another unnamed PDVSA subsidiary, business to certain contractors.
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