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With \r\nthat adventurous history, it is a wonder that in 1998 Obad\u00eda decided to reinvent \r\nhimself. He was an executive of large companies and an industrialist. He left \r\nmanufacturing to become an importer. He put it into practice when Hugo Ch\u00e1vez \r\nhad already gained power in Venezuela. In addition to his desire to change, the \r\nbest endorsement for his new commitment was, as he admits in an interview given \r\nfor this story, a politically unpolluted record. \"I was an entrepreneur who had \r\nno past, neither adeco nor copeyano (AD or COPEI political party supporter), or \r\nelse, because I had never worked with the Government.\"<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n
He \r\nassures that in 1999, he made his first sale of anti-riot equipment to the \r\nGovernment. But the best was yet to come. At least, that was his expectation. \r\nBetween 2001 and 2004, he changed the name of a company already constituted in \r\n1998 to Jotec S.A., and increased its capital to almost ten million bolivars of \r\nthat time (10 billion bolivars today). \"I created it with that capital, using a \r\nBandagro bonus, which the government will never pay, but which is good to use as \r\ncapital of companies,\" Obad\u00eda said in an interview last March. \"I created a \r\nstrong company to sell to the government, but that company never sold anything! \r\nWhy? Because I was wrong. In what sense? I did not need a national company to \r\nsell to the Government because I had to sell in bolivars, and then I had to \r\ndeliver to the Central Bank the dollars of that purchase at the official rate. \r\nNobody does that! Then I created the company in the Virgin \r\nIslands.\"<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n
Indeed, \r\nin 2003, Obad\u00eda incorporated a company in the British Virgin Islands, \r\nEscomLimited. Then, he would move it to Panama, which would be the basis of his \r\noperations from April. Why? Because he would then entrust the creation and \r\nmanagement of his legal structure to the law firm Mossack Fonseca, through its \r\noffice in Florida.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n
Through \r\nMossack Fonseca, Obad\u00eda registered over a dozen companies in Panama: three in \r\n2009, three in 2011, and five in 2012. In 2014, still in the hands of MF, he \r\ncreated two companies in Belize. It was the year of diplomatic deadlock with the \r\nGovernment of Panama of former President Ricardo Martinelli, who had then helped \r\nthe member of the opposition Maria Corina Machado to be part of an official \r\ndelegation of the country of the isthmus to give testimony before the OAS in \r\nWashington. Obad\u00eda, feared, with justifiable reasons, that the rupture of \r\nrelationships with Panama, where he had registered companies, would harm his \r\nbusiness opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n
Thus, \r\nObad\u00eda became one of the Venezuelans with the longest and most extended file in \r\nMossack Fonseca, as evidenced by the leak that came to the newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche \r\nZeitung in Munich, Germany, and which was accessed thanks to the project led by \r\nthe International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Upon reviewing \r\nthe papers, which include official documents and email exchanges, it is verified \r\nthat the relationship between the Venezuelan client and his Panamanian service \r\nprovider, although mutually profitable, has also been strained. Obad\u00eda \r\nfrequently appears objecting MF fees, complaining without reserves, he contacts \r\nemployees that are not supposed to be his interlocutors, and always writes his \r\nmessages in capital letters, which he justifies because of his poor eyesight, \r\nbut that are interpreted in the offices of the law firm as a constant scream. In \r\nApril 2014, lawyer Olga Santini, in charge of the MF office in Miami, gladly \r\naccepted the handling of the contact with Obad\u00eda to be transferred to Panama, \r\nprovided that the payment of her commissions is preserved.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n
In \r\naddition, the communication between Mossack Fonseca and Obad\u00eda eloquently \r\nillustrates what was the main idea of ??the business structures to be built. \r\nAlmost all the companies were designed to participate in contests to win import \r\ncontracts with Corporaci\u00f3n de Abastecimiento y Servicios Agr\u00edcolas La Casa S.A., \r\nthe organization created by Hugo Ch\u00e1vez to import food products and distribute \r\nthem through the Mercal network.<\/p>\n\n\n In \r\n2008, started - as you can see in the electronic correspondence of MF - the \r\nbusiness streak of Desir\u00e9 Obad\u00eda with Corporaci\u00f3n Casa, just at the beginning of \r\nthe presidency in that body of the then-lieutenant, Colonel Rodolfo Marco \r\nTorres, today vice president of the Economic Area.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n In \r\nAugust 2008, Obad\u00eda asked Mossack Fonseca for help in dealing with a Brazilian \r\nmeat supplier, the Quatro Marcos meat processing plant in Sao Paulo \u2013which, four \r\nmonths later, would be in default on payments -, as it required an assignment of \r\ncredit through Deutsche Bank. The matter would be satisfactorily resolved and \r\nthe business multiplied. In October of that same year, Obad\u00eda urged Rams\u00e9s Owens \r\nin MF to \"immediately open two companies,\" but, he warns in the same email, \r\n\"They cannot be in my name but they will be in the name of my \r\nrelatives\".<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n In \r\neffect, it would ultimately be Greenhill Group and Sanford Global, two companies \r\nincorporated in Panama. In June 2009, Obad\u00eda will have its flagship EscomLimited \r\n(created before in the Virgin Islands, but now with a capital of five million \r\ndollars) registered in the isthmus. However, he will first make sure that what \r\nhe was about to do will not mean paying taxes. \"You already told me that taxes \r\nare not paid in the Virgin Islands,\" he says in an email of January 26, 2009. \r\n\"How will the tax matter be with the companies registered in Panama?\" The \r\nadvisers reassure him that in Panama only the profits obtained by activities \r\ncarried out in its territory are taxed.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n In \r\n2012, he faces problems that he reported in an email to Rigoberto Coronado, \r\nlawyer of Mossack Fonseca. \"In Corporaci\u00f3n Casa, they realized that they have 19 \r\ncompanies with the same address as yours,\" writes Obad\u00eda to Coronado, \"9 or 10 \r\nof which are mine (...) The problem is that not all of them can have the same \r\naddress.\" MF immediately began to transfer the companies to other physical \r\naddresses and change the directors that could be repeated in the boards of \r\nseveral companies.<\/p>\n\n\n Internalizing \r\nthe idea of ??losing his low public profile, Desir\u00e9 Obad\u00eda granted an interview \r\nin Caracas, where he displayed unexpected openness and cordiality based on the \r\npapers of MF. He acknowledged that he has done business with Corporaci\u00f3n Casa, \r\nand made a list, \"I entered into a meat contract, another one for beans, one for \r\ncorn.\" Each of these assignments, he confessed, reported profits close to one \r\nmillion dollars.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n Immediately \r\ntinged that success story with a list of the setbacks and obstacles he had \r\nfaced. He says, for example, that he lost money in an operation with the \r\nBrazilian food giant, Sadia. \"I still had to ship a thousand tons of a contract \r\nthat was for 3,000 or 5,000 tons of meat. I do not remember well. Sadia told me \r\nthat they had meat available, already in port ready to dispatch. Then I assigned \r\nit a letter of credit that I had from Corporaci\u00f3n Casa, and on top of that, they \r\nasked me for 500,000 dollars as collateral, which I did. But at that moment, \r\nthey had problems with Casa for a mortadella that went bad. Then they changed \r\nthe damaged mortadella of Corporaci\u00f3n Casa for the meat they had in port and \r\nmade me look bad... Then, they took six months to send me 500 tons of meet. And \r\nthen they told me that the price went up, that they could not continue shipping \r\nmeet to me, and they did not. They took three additional months to reimburse me \r\nthe $ 500,000 I paid.\"<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n He \r\ndefines his strategy of creating multiple legal entities to contract with the \r\nState as an almost probabilistic, legitimate and even necessary trick. \"Let me \r\ntell you one thing, there are many envious people out there. I do not want to \r\nhave a single company that has sold ten times to the Government. That gives room \r\nto speculations. On the other hand, they also do not like buying everything from \r\nthe same company. I made several companies with the idea of ??obtaining \r\ncontracts that sometimes I did not achieve.\"<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n He \r\ndenies opening a new company in his portfolio for every possible new operation. \r\nWhat he has done, he accepts, is to incorporate circumstantial allies into his \r\ncompanies, as shareholder partners that provide capital to finance their mass \r\nimports. This is the case, for example, of company Markwell Investments, which \r\nhe incorporated in 2012. A year later, he included Fabio M\u00e9ndez Rico, Luis \r\nAlberto Rivas, Roberto Bobby Pocaterra and Tulio Hinestrosa, members of one of \r\nthe most powerful importing groups of the last 15 years as shareholders. \r\nTogether, they completed through Markwell an operation to import 30,000 metric \r\ntons of yellow corn in 2013.<\/p>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/armando.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/PP-33.png\")
Partners with Rights<\/h2>\n\n\n