{"id":2566,"date":"2017-11-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/armando.info\/?p=2566"},"modified":"2017-11-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-11-12T00:00:00","slug":"last-stroke-to-rescue-410-million-dollars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/last-stroke-to-rescue-410-million-dollars\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Stroke to Rescue 410 Million Dollars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u00c1lvaro \r\nGorr\u00edn knew what was coming. The president of Banco Canarias was accused of \r\nappropriating the funds of his savers and criminal association shortly after the \r\ngovernment of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez ordered in November 2009 the intervention of eight \r\nbanks accused of irregularly managing their funds. The urban legend says that he \r\nleft Venezuela on board his yacht and ended up on the US coasts just before he \r\nwas issued a prohibition to leave the country.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

Months \r\nlater, the government ordered the intervention of Credican, another commercial \r\ncompany of Gorr\u00edn, much less known, which he did not liquidate immediately, as \r\nhe did with Banco Canarias, which was financially buried just a month after its \r\nintervention. Months passed and Credican, although intervened, was still \r\nstanding, which meant for Gorr\u00edn and his associates the opportunity to rescue at \r\nleast some of what was trapped in the way of doing business in Venezuela, Lehman \r\nnotes - or Lehman bonds - transferred to Credican by Banco Canarias valued at \r\n410 million dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n

Banco Canarias, which was financially buried just a month after its intervention.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n

The \r\nmove was ambitious, it required planning and could not be a legal initiative by \r\nGorr\u00edn personally or Credican, as they were accused and sunk in legal problems \r\nwith the Venezuelan government. Meanwhile, the former banker, his business \r\nacumen and with his son as a partner, proved the path of other investments and \r\nthus opened company Don Pan in the state of Florida, which opened at least 20 \r\nbranches in less than three years to please the growing public of Venezuelan \r\nmigrants in their search for the perfect baguette or cachito de jam\u00f3n (a \r\ncroissant-like bread filled with minced ham) that they used to find in the \r\nstreets of Caracas, or Maracaibo, or Valencia.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

It \r\nwas then that Gorr\u00edn, contracting the services of Appleby and the support of \r\ncontacts in the New York Chadbourne & Parke law firm, could create company \r\nSmith Rocke Ltd. on March 1, 2012, and registered it in the British Virgin \r\nIslands. The leak of documents that make up the Paradise Papers accounts that \r\nAppleby showed concern about the Gorr\u00edn\u2019s unfinished business with the \r\nVenezuelan justice, but soon dismissed the matter when Chadbourne & Parke \r\nassure him that the banker is free of problems.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

\"Regarding \r\nthe criminal investigation and extradition procedure mentioned in your email, \r\nAlvaro Gorr\u00edn, like many influential businessmen in Venezuela, was the subject \r\nof several attacks on his reputation motivated by political reasons. These \r\nactions are intended to harass and obstruct the ordinary course of any \r\nnegotiation. As far as we know, both the criminal investigation and the \r\nextradition are no longer in process,\" says the email.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

Another \r\nletter, signed by Clara Krivoy, an international partner of the New York law \r\nfirm took in November 2011 a step forward in defense of Gorr\u00edn: \"I have known \r\nAlvaro Gorr\u00edn for more than two years, and the nature of our relationship is \r\nprofessional. During that time, I have formed the opinion that the client is \r\nrespectable and reliable in his affairs, financially stable, and I have no \r\nreason to suspect otherwise.\"<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n

Based \r\non these credentials, and even when Gorr\u00edn was later imprisoned in Caracas in \r\nNovember 2014, Appleby contributed to the creation of Smith Rocke Ltd., which \r\nproceeds in January 2014 to sue the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela before the \r\nSouthern District Court of New York. With the action, it intends to claim the \r\nLehman notes that remained as part of Credican properties at the time of being \r\nintervened by the Ch\u00e1vez government.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

Upon \r\nfiling the lawsuit, Smith Rocke affirms having bought Credican shares and \r\ntherefore, it has a legitimate interest in its properties, including the Lehman \r\nbonds, which it says have a value of 410 million dollars. However, that purchase \r\nor transfer of shares of Credican to Smith Rocke, created in 2012, raised many \r\nquestions. How could Credican make this transfer if it had been intervened since \r\n2010 and was managed by an intervening board appointed by the Venezuelan \r\nSuperintendency of Banks? Who allowed that transfer or \r\nsale?<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

In \r\nfact, other Appleby leaks show Smith Rocke Ltd. as part of Credican, as well as \r\na company called Akamai Globan Inc., created on the same day as Smith Rocke, and \r\namong its shareholders is Rafael Gonz\u00e1lez Yanes, who had also been president of \r\nBanco Canarias, and one of its vice presidents, Manuel Herrera \r\nCastilla.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

In \r\nthe summary of the lawsuit, Judge Lorna Schofield claims that Credican \r\nintervening board requested the bankruptcy management office of Lehman Brothers \r\n(LBHI Bankrupcy) to dismiss any claim by the company's shareholders, as the \r\ncompany was intervened by the Venezuelan government. \"In effect, preventing \r\nSmith Rocke from getting any payment for the Lehman notes,\" the judge \r\nwrote.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

So \r\nwhile a portion of Credican's board of directors allowed the sale of shares to \r\nSmith Rocke, other members of that board warned the Lehman bankruptcy office not \r\nto pay the shareholders? Who wanted to help Gorr\u00edn and who did \r\nnot?<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

Based \r\non the summary of the lawsuit published by the New York court, Venezuelan Rafael \r\nJos\u00e9 Moreno Franco and Rosa Mar\u00eda Jimenez Urrutia were the agents appointed by \r\nSudeban as administrators of Credican. We tried to contact them without success \r\nyet.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

While \r\nthese questions remain about the performance of Credican's intervening board, \r\nthe New York court dismissed Smith Rocke's claim with the final aim of \r\ncollecting the Lehman notes as it is a matter outside its jurisdiction. The last \r\nstroke of Gorr\u00edn to rescue some \"ashes\" of 410 million dollars was drowned in \r\nthe organization of a company for which it could have obtained aid from the same \r\nones that expropriated it in Venezuela.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

After \r\nthis event, \u00c1lvaro Gorr\u00edn dared to return to Caracas in late 2014, shortly after \r\nSudeban ordered the liquidation of Credican in April of that year by resolution \r\n066.14 published in the Official Gazette. He was then arrested in a restaurant \r\nin the capital and held in the Bolivarian Intelligence Service until March 2015, \r\nwhen the court that judges him for the misappropriation of the resources of \r\nBanco Canarias savers decided to proceed with his trial in \r\nfreedom.<\/p>\n\n\n

(*) \r\nThis note is part of the Paradise Papers project. This project analyzed 13.4 \r\nmillion documents from two offshore service providers, Appleby (Bermuda) and \r\nAsiaciti Trust (Hong Kong), and business records of 19 tax havens, obtained by \r\nthe German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung due to a leak that it shared through \r\nthe International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ, Washington) \r\nwith 382 journalists from 96 media in 67 countries. In Venezuela, the project \r\npartner is Armando.info, which made an alliance to publish it with the newspaper \r\nEl Nacional.<\/p>\n\n\r\n\n

<\/p>\n\n

\"\"<\/span><\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Venezuelan \u00c1lvaro Gorr\u00edn escaped on his yacht in 2009 after the intervention of Banco Canarias, but he and his board members did not resign themselves to losing everything to the Venezuelan government. Between the support of an influential New York law firm and the expertise of Appleby to create companies in tax havens, the then fugitive from the Venezuelan justice drew a strategy to rescue something from the ruins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":53726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","ghostkit_customizer_options":"","ghostkit_custom_css":"","ghostkit_custom_js_head":"","ghostkit_custom_js_foot":"","ghostkit_typography":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2389,2387,2210],"tags":[176],"pais":[4216],"serie":[],"localizacion":[4227],"ppma_author":[2379],"class_list":["post-2566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-deportes","category-internacionales","category-investigacion","tag-venezuela","pais-venezuela-en"],"acf":{"reportage-top-html":""},"views":2325,"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":2389,"label":"Deportes"},{"value":2387,"label":"Internacionales"},{"value":2210,"label":"Investigacion"}],"post_tag":[{"value":176,"label":"Venezuela"}],"pais":[{"value":4216,"label":"Venezuela"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/armando.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/12112017-1portada.png",1250,500,false],"author_info":{"display_name":"ARMANDO.INFO","author_link":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/author\/armando2\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":2389,"name":"Deportes","slug":"deportes","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":2389,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":16,"filter":"raw","menu_order":"0","cat_ID":2389,"category_count":16,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Deportes","category_nicename":"deportes","category_parent":0},{"term_id":2387,"name":"Internacionales","slug":"internacionales","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":2387,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":127,"filter":"raw","menu_order":"0","cat_ID":2387,"category_count":127,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Internacionales","category_nicename":"internacionales","category_parent":0},{"term_id":2210,"name":"Investigacion","slug":"investigacion","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":2210,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":670,"filter":"raw","menu_order":"0","cat_ID":2210,"category_count":670,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Investigacion","category_nicename":"investigacion","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":[{"term_id":176,"name":"Venezuela","slug":"venezuela","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":176,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":100,"filter":"raw","menu_order":"0"}],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 12:26:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"authors":[{"term_id":2379,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"valentina-lares","display_name":"VALENTINA LARES","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2566"},{"taxonomy":"pais","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pais?post=2566"},{"taxonomy":"serie","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/serie?post=2566"},{"taxonomy":"localizacion","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/localizacion?post=2566"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armando.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=2566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}