VENEZUELA COURT SLAPS PRISON TERMS ON CITGO OFFICERS

A Venezuelan court sentenced six former executives of US refiner Citgo to prison after finding them guilty of corruption charges.

The officials were arrested in November 2017 after being called into a meeting at the Caracas office of state oil company PDVSA, which owns Citgo. They were accused of crimes such as embezzlement, money laundering and conspiracy, Sarah Kinosian in Caracas and Marianna Paraga reported for Reuters. Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaido took control of Houston-based Citgo, Venezuela’s most profitable overseas asset, in 2019 after the United States recognized him as the country’s legitimate president. Caracas tagged the action as piracy.

The former president of the company, Jose Pereira, was fined $2 million and sentenced to 13 years and seven months while the five others, former Citgo vice presidents Jose Luis Zambrano, Alirio Jose Zambrano, Jorge Toledo, Tomeu Vadell and Gustavo Cardenas, were sentenced to more than eight years.

The six denied wrongdoing and a lawyer on their defense team said they planned to appeal. “The evidence for the crimes they are accused of was not there, it did not even mention the six of them,” said the lawyer, Maria Alejandra. “The defense, we were ready for this decision because they are political prisoners.” Some of the convicts are naturalized US citizens, the Associated Press (AP) reported.