Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
A Venezuelan national previously accused of complicity in a massive fraud and corruption scheme bought an expensive condo in a New York City building owned by President Donald Trump and then flipped the property to a company accused of laundering proceeds from the scheme.
Moris Beracha, a former adviser to Venezuela’s finance minister, was one of the wealthiest people in the country when he was sued in 2011 by a court-appointed receiver in the U.S. over his alleged role in a nine-figure Ponzi scheme involving his nation’s state-owned oil company. The architect of that scheme, Venezuelan-American hedge-fund manager Francisco Illarramendi, was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2013 after pleading guilty to fraud and obstruction charges.
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The court in that case appointed a receiver to recover money stolen as part of that Ponzi scheme. The receiver subsequently sued Beracha, accusing him of using a maze of offshore companies and bank accounts in the Virgin Islands, Panama, and Switzerland to provide liquidity for Illarramendi’s scheme, launder its proceeds, and bribe Venezuelan government officials. The case was dismissed in 2014, and Beracha did not admit any wrongdoing.
Illarramendi’s underlying conduct was nevertheless the precise type of activity to which President Trump has pointed in railing against the endemic corruption that has contributed to Venezuela’s dire economic woes. So it’s remarkable that Beracha’s financial transactions around the time that Illarramendi was bilking Venezuelan taxpayers and investors included the sale of a condo in New York’s Trump World Tower.
Beracha purchased Unit 36A in that building in 2002 after taking out a $1.4 million mortgage. Trump himself affixed his signature to the deed alongside Beracha’s, New York property records show.
Five years later, Beracha sold the unit for $3 million. The buyer was a company called Bradleyville Ltd., which the court receiver later listed as one of four entities accused of shuffling around investor money as part of Illarramendi’s Ponzi scheme. Bradleyville was incorporated in the Virgin Islands, listed a New York address in property records, and a Caracas address on its mortgage paperwork.
That mortgage came from the bank HSBC. Nine months after he sold the Trump World Tower condo, Beracha emailed Illarramendi asking him to deposit $10 million into another HSBC account, according to documents revealed as part of the receiver’s lawsuit.
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