The Hong Kong-registered company, linked to Colombian entrepreneurs Alex Nain Saab Morán and Álvaro Enrique Pulido Vargas, seems to be the great ally of Nicolás Maduro Government. Millionaire contracts for the supply of millions of CLAP boxes, the flagship program of Hugo Chávez's successor, were just the beginning. The company, with a foggy trail in Venezuela, also acts as the intermediary of the Ministry of Health in the purchase of the highly-scarce medicines in hospitals and pharmacies in the country.
New documents show that the Hong Kong-registered company is one of Nicolás Maduro’s favorite to do business. While there are companies in the Venezuelan private sector that wait years for the payment of foreign currencies, in 2017, this company obtained at least two contracts for the supply of over 20 million of the boxes that the Government sells at subsidized prices, and it invoiced 113 million dollars to the Ministry of Food in just one day. The papers also confirm the connection of this company with Fondo Global de Construcción (Global Construction Fund), a network built by Colombian entrepreneurs Alex Nain Saab Morán and Álvaro Enrique Pulido Vargas, through which they obtained contracts under Hugo Chávez for the construction of prefabricated houses.
The tension between the governments of Nicolás Maduro and Juan Carlos Varela is nonstop. But the surge of trade retaliations from both capitals peculiarly leaves some of the companies that since 2017 provide merchandise to Chávez’s flagship program (the Local Supply and Production Committees - Clap) unharmed. Two of these companies show the profile of opportunistic shell companies.
The network of intermediaries contracting with the Venezuelan Foreign Trade Corporation (Corpovex) to bring CLAP boxes seems infinite. In Sabadell, a town near Barcelona, a virtually cash shell company got 70 million dollars for outsourcing the shipment of food to Venezuela thanks to the administration of Nicolás Maduro, which buys the contents of the boxes at discretionary prices and without control. Last year alone, the government spent 2,500 to 3,500 million dollars, but only the leaders of the "Bolivarian revolution" know the actual figure.
The Venezuelan government has resorted to a myriad of trading intermediaries to provide imported merchandise for the Claps, its star food aid program. With massive purchases in international markets, it poorly satisfies the hunger of popular sectors while safely feeding the financial flows that end in bank accounts in Hong Kong or Switzerland.
In Mexico, there is a long tradition of cheating in the supply of dairy products packaged for social programs. Hence, it should not be surprising that the Venezuelan corruption had found in that country the perfect formula to include in the so-called CLAP Boxes a paste purchased at auction price as cow's powdered milk. For a mysterious reason, ghostly or barely known companies are the ones monopolizing purchase orders from Venezuela.
