The never-ending scams of Pedro Castillo

Contacted two years later he assures that these complaints led to nowhere

None of the workers, around 25 people, could collect their wages, not even the ones that started working since October, denounced at that time Nelson Rubio, one of the journalists Castillo Uzcátegui owed $8.000 from his salary as the conductor of one of the shows. Contacted two years later he assures that these complaints led to nowhere because even today the man has not paid any of them.

Roberto Ariel confirms it. This Cuban journalist was hired by the Venezuelan to make a news web page for the radio station. He worked with him for 45 days and left, not only because he was not paid but because he was blatantly deceived. “A lot worse” he assures.

Two were the excuses given by Castillo Uzcátegui to the station staff to justify the late payments, one was that he had a check for $3.000.000 made out to him that he had not been able to deposit. He even showed it as a proof that he could pay. “But it was fake”, assures Ariel. The other excuse concerned his bank accounts which were frozen as a result of the divorce application he was facing at the moment.

This was the excuse he gave to Ariel. He had verbally committed himself to pay him $2.000 as a monthly salary, promising to raise it up to $3.000 or $4.000 if business went well.

Within 15 days of work in the radio station he asked for the payment. Castillo Uzcátegui told him he would give him the money at the end of the month stating that was the reached agreement. It didn’t happen. He insisted and the man wanted to make a deal. Roberto Ariel remembers the scene and the dialogues:

“He told me he had some jewelry he would pawn so he could pay me a part but not the whole amount”

“He told me he had some jewelry he would pawn so he could pay me a part but not the whole amount. He asked me how much money did I need, I told him at least the rent money which were $550 and he told me ?OK, let’s trade the jewels’.

When they were going out to the pawnshop, Castillo Uzcátegui asked him to wait in the station for an acquaintance that would bring a package, meanwhile he would look for the jewels at his house and they would meet at the shop door at the agreed time. Ariel trusted his word.

“When I arrived, he was nowhere to be seen. He never showed up, never stood up to me. I complained to him, he banned me from entering the station, I waited for him at the door every day and in the end I left. He never answered. That is Pedro Castillo”, says in his heavy Cuban accent and with a tone of indignation as if the offense had just occurred.

All those who didn’t collect their salary decided to join and hire a famous Cuban lawyer to sue. They didn’t achieve anything. For the case to prosper, Castillo Uzcátegui had to have some property on his name so that the lawyer of the victims could take the amount of the debt from there and distribute it, but they couldn’t find anything. The lawyer dismissed them. They contacted another one with the same result. Without a property, they couldn’t win the case, so none of them wanted to take on that lost cause.

Although they couldn’t recover their money, the investigation made by this Cubans leaded them to find indications that the Venezuelan was no novice on these matters. Years back something of the sort had occurred to various Venezuelans linked to the media, that had started to migrate to Miami.  Castillo Uzcátegui had use the same pattern and improved his technique, especially after that one lawsuit that could prosper for issuing bad checks.

“This lasted almost three months, until none of us could stand not receiving the accorded fees.”

On this project Castillo Uzcátegui applied his cunning. He wanted to form a TV channel exclusively for information so he contacted two renowned professionals to drive it forward: Eduardo Sapene, who had been vice president of information on RCTV (one of the main open television channels in Venezuela until it went off air on May 2007 after Hugo Chávez refused to renew its concession) and Arnaldo Limanski, a movies and soup operas producer in Venezuela and Latin America. With both names to his credit he started the quest for talents.

The host María Alejandra Requena remembers she didn’t know Castillo Uzcátegui but she did know Sapene, and it was because of him, because of his trajectory on RCTV and for having worked on the same channel, that she decided to listen to the proposition. They began negotiations through her manager and finally there was no agreement. “Thanks God it didn’t happen” she says now.

From the only time she spoke to Castillo, a brief encounter where they only talked about the project, she was left with the impression that the man was a little arrogant but that he had a clear view of what he wanted to do and how.

Limanski accepted working with him because of the invitation from quite “eminent” Venezuelan journalists. “If they were there, it must be good”, he says, but he also acknowledges that his own name was used to get a good staff, because if he was in, good projects could be expected. Limanski was the producer of all of Román Chalbaud’s movies, except “El Pez que Fuma”, he worked on RCTV producing soap operas, he was production manager on Venevisión and Vice President of Telemundo in Miami.

His work in RH Noticias would be mounting the channel and the production of the programs in the two studios rented for that end. Castillo Uzcátegui ended up owing him $30.000 after three months of work. On this time, he delayed the payments and when he finally delivered all the checks at the same time, they all bounced. The checks had no funds.

“I was one of those who took most of the damage, I remember Sapene didn’t last more than 15 days”, Limanski points out. Contacted via email, Sapene chose to stand aside: “My working relationship with Mr. Castillo was very brief and it occurred almost six years ago, so I don’t wish to speak more of that subject”, he answered.

After various months on production, changes on stage, contact with international news agencies and apparent investments on technology, the channel didn’t go on air in digital. “It was a lot of money. A month passed, another more and he didn’t pay. Besides we started to notice that he was delaying everything. Those of us who could endure it for a while would, but it came a moment when we asked ourselves “what’s going on here?”, adds Limanski.

“What Castillo offered sounded like a good idea so many of us decided to take the risk.”

“What Castillo offered sounded like a good idea so many of us decided to take the risk. Half way we started getting comments from friends and even family members of Pedro himself called to warned us about making business with him because he didn’t pay. One of us made the remark to him and he said those were envious people, that it wasn’t true.  After that the workers started complaining that they weren’t getting paid and we didn’t understand what was going on because Pedro showed us the checks”, says a Venezuelan journalist. They had no funds.

On those days of Democracia TV, Castillo Uzcátegui meets the Venezuelan that would accept to become his partner, a young man who had various TV equipment and some money support with which he was planning to publish an equestrian magazine. He knew again how to aim at his target.

The partner invested near $60.000 between the channel and the magazine, and although Castillo Uzcátegui also invested some amount, the project started to crumble as the payments delayed. It ended up falling apart when he started asking the advertisers of the magazine for money in exchange for publications that never came to exist.

The equestrian project and the partnership between both men ended, but the breakup showed another act of cunning from Castillo Uzcátegui. Without warning or authorization, he had registered the channel under this associate and other investor’s names, getting rid of the budget responsibilities. He was in charge of administration and finances in all of the projects, the advertiser’s checks should get to his hands and he would deposit them. That’s what was strange about the lack of payments because it couldn’t be understood what he did with the money.

“Pedro is a very open guy, agreeable, with a skill to sell ideas, he manages you to connect with him”

The list of affected Venezuelans isn’t short, there are more than 10 renowned names like Roland Carreño, alongside with that of other producers, moderators, journalists, technicians and administrative personnel, but different from the Cubans that were conned by the same person, the Venezuelans didn’t join to make the swindles public. Was it shame, pride, the risk of losing their migratory status? Various factors to consider. The truth is that all these stories allow to construct a summary of very well thought and convincing actions from a very skillful man.

“Pedro is a very open guy, agreeable, with a skill to sell ideas, he manages you to connect with him. He’s also a bit shameless, if he owes you money and you run into him on the street he will greet you as if nothing happened, and he’s capable of telling you that you are the one that owes him. He’s the perfect con man”, says with a laugh another Venezuelan journalist that worked for him in DTV Mundo.

It was also known that Castillo Uzcátegui had relations with Jorge Rodríguez

It was also known that Castillo Uzcátegui had relations with Jorge Rodríguez, an important figure on Chávez’s Government and now of Nicolás Maduro’s. They were partners, says a person close to the family, one of his associates in Miami.

A report issued by the General Accountancy Office of Venezuela on 2011 included this case on a chapter dedicated to the Fonendógeno. The organization’s version states that Promotora Chana company got 13,72 million bolívares for the rebuild of the Chana Puerto Fermín hotel (the old El Tirano hotel), but it infringed the conditions stated for the credit that included the mortgage of the hotel in favor of Fonendógeno and the payment of this fund in fixed quotas in an 8-year period.   

Promotora Chana didn’t fulfill Fonendógeno’s mortgage because it had already signed on another one with the Banco Industrial de Venezuela (Industrial Bank of Venezuela), for a loan to remodel this same hotel. But it even fell into another irregularity by selling the hotel to Seguros Premier insurance company on July 2009, two years after receiving the funding. On 2010 the insurance company declared bankruptcy.

On this truss of irregularities where the Accountancy Office couldn’t determine the whereabouts of the given money, Castillo Uzcátegui sued Seguros Premier for not paying him: even though the contract of sale was legally registered, the funds never arrived to his account. The Chana Puerto Fermín hotel was sold in 103 million bolívares, about $16 million at the time. Nowadays it is in the hands of the State and abandoned.

This case represents the ending of Castillo Uzcátegui’s business story in Margarita Island, a story that was already bad from past years. He had been the manager of a garbage collecting company called Cauvica, registered in 1997 in Nueva Esparta that gave its services on this entity and on Anzoátegui. On this company, that was from a family member, he had to face numerous labor lawsuits for not paying his workers, even though he received funds to pay for these liabilities. The company closed and he kept owing the personnel.

After that he tried to break his bad streak as a manager with Promotora Chana, boosting his mother’s project of expanding the Ranchos de Chana to other areas and opening hotels in Los Roques Island, Coche Island and Margarita in El Cardón Beach apart from the El Tirano housing. In fact, on January 2009 he opened the Chana El Cardón hotel after 18 months of building and 50 million bolívares invested, a work that started almost at the same time as he received the State funding to rebuild the El Tirano hotel. There are no few versions that coincide with the statement that the hotel was constructed with diverted public funds.

And from the inauguration of the Chana El Cardón hotel, later named as Ikin Margarita, the luxury party was very well remembered, a party that had the presence of the Spanish Bertín Osborne, the only one that could charge for his work because he asked for his payment in advance, assure friends and people who attended the event.

“That’s a lie, they took it against me and I had to come here”

It was like this that the plans for expanding the Chana hotels didn’t last. With a history of lawsuits against him and against the Promotora Chana company that started to fall strongly since 2010 and that included trials for the charging of bolívares (Bolívar Banco and Banco Fondo Común), property lien, prohibition from alienating and encumbering assets, aggravated fraud and breach of contracts, Castillo Uzcátegui decides to leave Venezuela. He did it before the arrest warrant against him was issued by Interpol.

“That’s a lie, they took it against me and I had to come here”, told Castillo Uzcátegui to one of his associates on DTV Mundo in Miami some years ago, talking about that warrant that is still active and that almost nobody knew about on each of his bad tracks.

He has not been detained, but the charges in his record have been updated: fraudulent harvest of public funds. Castillo Uzcátegui was contacted by phone to ask him about his stance and his version of all the accusations against him, from the frauds to the Interpol warrant, but he only said “no” and hanged up the call.