WILLEMSTAD, MIAMI - A lawsuit was filed in a federal court in South Florida alleging that the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro maintains under his control a small Miami bank, the Eastern National Bank, which he would have used to evade United States sanctions against his regime.
The minority shareholders of the Eastern National Bank were the ones who filed the lawsuit alleging details of the association with Chavismo. They say that 99% of the bank's shares belong to the company Mercorp, registered in Curaçao under the number 35953 at the Chamber of Commerce and located at Pareraweg 45. According to the registry, this company belongs to the Corpofin from Venezuela. This was seized and remains under the control of the Caracas regime. The Curaçao Chamber of Commerce registry indicates that the owner of Mercorp is the Venezuelan citizen Juan Jose Caso LLano and is represented locally by Amicorp Curaçao B.V.
Among those who appear in the lawsuit filed in January is Gabina Rodríguez, who chaired the entity's board between 2015 and 2021. Rodríguez was appointed by the Chavista authorities as Corpofin's comptroller.
Rodriguez is an agent of the sanctioned Maduro regime in Venezuela, and as long as she remains in complete control of the Eastern National Bank, the Maduro regime will have access to the United States financial system, allowing Maduro to evade OFAC sanctions, according to the demand.
The sanctions prohibit companies and citizens on US soil from doing business with officials or entities unless they have a special license from the Treasury Department.
The minority shareholders allege that the directors of Eastern National Bank breached their fiduciary duties. With this they have caused damage to the bank and harming the share value of the institution.
The defendants, although they recognize the singularity of the shareholding composition of the bank, deny that this implies being under the control of the Maduro regime. They emphasize that the bank obtained OFAC permits to operate in the US with the current shareholding structure.
“The court should not and cannot put on the banking regulator hat,” states one of the documents filed in court by the defendants. Others of those mentioned, in addition to Rodríguez, are Louis Ferreira, César Gómez, Keith Parker, Carlos Rodríguez and Gustavo Macías, directors and former directors of the bank.
They noted that the OFAC licenses “are sufficient to show that the majority shareholding relationship was approved by the appropriate regulatory agency (and) the plaintiffs cannot use this action to challenge the validity of the conduct of the board of directors … when that conduct has been expressly authorized by the proper agency of the executive branch.”
They also say that the shareholding position of the plaintiffs, which barely reaches 1%, is insignificant.
Maduro's part in the Eastern National Bank
The complaint filed by the plaintiffs clearly delineates Gabina Rodríguez's relationship with the Maduro regime.
They explain that Maduro appointed her in 2009 as the recipient of Corpofin, granting her full control of Mercop. This is why Rodríguez can name herself as the sole managing director of Mercorp, which owns the majority block of Eastern. This also allows the firm to have the necessary votes to choose the members of the board of directors, they said in the lawsuit.
Rodríguez is a longtime civil servant in Venezuela, with 30 years of work in the country's bureaucracy. She was part of the Industrial Bank of Venezuela in the 1990s and then landed in the Comptroller General of the Republic, from where she left in 2002 to join the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
The dark plays of the Eastern
The suit explains that Eastern National Bank helped Caracas maintain access to the international financial system when "all US banks" closed their correspondent banking relationship with Banco de Venezuela by opening and maintaining such an account with the Bank. state bank.
The decision caused problems for the Eastern National Bank after the Treasury Department's Comptroller of the Currency detected in 2018 a series of deficiencies in anti-money laundering practices and those related to banking secrecy with the Banco de Venezuela account.
The Comptroller identified 10 account relationships with "insufficient due diligence information." The entity ordered the bank to appoint an Enforcement Committee of three directors, two of whom could not be employees, executives or shareholders of the bank.
The plaintiffs say that the bank did not adopt the corrective measures and that this was stated by the Comptroller in another warning in 2020.
With information from El Nuevo Herald