Dubai is a hiding place for the key man of Espirito Santo bribes in Venezuela

An employee of the centenary Portuguese bank was chosen in 2009 to serve, from the island of Madeira, as a contact with officials of the Chavista regime who agreed to do business with the dying institution - it would collapse in 2014 - but only in exchange for juicy bribes.

Today João Alexandre Silva remains safe from any legal action in an opulent Emirati refuge, protected by his investments, by the lack of an extradition treaty and by the lackadaisical reluctance of the authorities of the Arab nation.

There are opportunities that can be irresistible for those who believe that money brings happiness and that their train passes only once in a lifetime.

This is what happened to the Portuguese João Alexandre Silva when he believed that his opportunity had come, at the age of 50, of which he had spent 15 years working as an employee at Banco Espirito Santo (BES).

Silva was then General Director of the Foreign Financial Branch (SFE) of the BES, located in the tax haven of the island of Madeira, in the Atlantic Ocean, where many wealthy clients from South America, South Africa and Angola maintained their accounts.

Madeira is also the origin of many of the members of the extensive Portuguese colony in Venezuela. Precisely because of that large and influential Madeiran community in Venezuela, Silva was able to cultivate good contacts among the Caracas elite.

Such was the key attribute for the bank’s president, Ricardo Salgado, to notice Silva and choose him in early 2009 to serve as an advisor to Espirito Santo Bankers Dubai (ESBD), one of the many companies in the BES corporate jellyfish. . From that position he had to serve as a valve for the flow of bribes with which Salgado began to pay Venezuelan State officials who agreed to do business with the BES. 

Silva got on that train and did his job. According to the Portuguese Public Ministry, it was the help of João Alexandre Silva that allowed Ricardo Salgado to pay, between 2009 and 2014 Salgado paid 214 million dollars in bribes to Chavista officials, in exchange for guaranteeing the injection, by successive governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, of large sums of money in the BES.

Among the Venezuelans allegedly bribed in the plot are Rafael Ramírez, former foreign minister, former Minister of Petroleum and former president of the state oil company PDVSA, and Nervis Villalobos, former Vice Minister of Energy. In total, the list of recipients of these irregular payments includes 19 officials linked to the Treasury Bank and the Economic and Social Development Bank of Venezuela (Bandes), or to public companies such as PDVSA itself, Bariven and Electricidad de Caracas.

The criminal investigation into relations between the BES and Venezuela concluded in July of last year. Although it led to several charges against BES executives - and none against the Venezuelan citizens involved - there is still no forecast as to when the trial could begin. Among the accused is Ricardo Salgado again, who is already accumulating sentences for other causes derived from the BES disaster. 

And another defendant is João Alexandre Silva.

Silva is accused of 20 crimes of active corruption, 20 of money laundering and one of criminal association, all of them co-authored with Salgado and three other employees of the Espírito Group (GES) in Switzerland and Dubai. In addition, Silva has been charged with corruption and money laundering since December 2021, in a parallel case for his alleged involvement in the payment of bribes to a vice president of the Bank of Brazil. And last March, the bank executive was exonerated of two forgery crimes of which he had been accused in 2020 in the main case, regarding the irregular management of the BES. 

But when the new trial of the BES/Venezuela case begins, Silva will be absent. He is safe in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he lives. This was confirmed by his lawyer, Artur Marques. On the other hand, according to the Lisbon newspaper Expresso , it was able to verify in the public database of the Emirati authorities responsible for civil registration, his residence permit was renewed in June 2022. 

This Emirati refuge for the rich and famous has been especially receptive to Silva, as Expresso was now able to verify thanks to the Dubai Unlocked investigation, in which 70 media outlets from around the world participate, and led by the Organized Crime Reporting Project and Corruption (Occrp) and the Norwegian newspaper E24 . The investigation arose from a leak of information on hundreds of thousands of properties in Dubai. The leak, in turn, was originally obtained by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a non-profit organization based in Washington DC, which investigates international crimes and conflicts.

In the leak files it can be seen that, among the 334 Portuguese citizens who from 2020 to 2022 owned properties in Dubai, was João Alexandre Silva.

He charged, fled and they didn’t catch him

In addition to his annual salary of about 150,000 euros, Silva received almost eight million additional dollars for the services provided to Ricardo Salgado in the irregular management of Espirito Santo. The payments, which went to Switzerland and the UAE, included $2.1 million in bonuses, three bank transfers of more than $1 million each, and a $1.9 million real estate loan granted by one of the banks of the Espírito Santo Group, ES Bank Panamá. 

The real estate loan was granted in 2013 for a period of five years but, at least until 2018, it had not been repaid. It was used to buy an apartment in Dubai, when João Alexandre Silva also obtained resident status in the Emirates. 

But Silva’s property that appears in the Dubai Unlocked leak is not the same one that he bought with that “credit” granted by ES Bank Panama (ESBP); In reality, a perk granted by Ricardo Salgado to Silva.

In the Dubai Unlocked leak, Silva is identified as the owner of a 100-square-meter apartment in a building, DAMAC Heights , next to the Dubai Marina and in front of Palm Jumeirah, one of the city’s emblematic artificial islands built in the shape palm tree  Silva, who declined to respond to Expresso
’s questions , is no longer the owner of the apartment, according to a search of the Dubai property registry. In fact, his name stopped appearing in the real estate registry of the city, where, however, he still lives.

A fashionable refuge for the rich and famous from around the world, Dubai has become a recipient of escaped funds and people wanted by justice, such as João Alexandre Silva, former BES executive. Credit: Ole Martin Wold

Both in the BES/Venezuela criminal case and in the cadastral data of the property in DAMAC Heights that appears in the Dubai Unlocked leak, Silva gave another address as his official residence, right next to that building: an apartment of more than 270 meters squares in the Infinity Tower , also known as Cayan Tower , a 75-story skyscraper with an original design, as if the building had been twisted by giant hands. It has not been possible to find out who it belongs to.

The only property that Portuguese prosecutors identified in their investigation as property of João Alexandre Silva was the apartment purchased in August 2013 with the alleged ESBP credit in Panama, granted to a company incorporated in the Jebel Ali free zone, one of Dubai offshore centers. 

The company has its initials: JAS Property Limited. Expresso confirmed on the Dubai Property Registry website that this company continues to control real estate properties, although it was impossible to know if it only owns the property indicated by the Prosecutor’s Office or owns others.

The apartment purchased by Silva through JAS Property Limited is in a residential complex, Tiara Residences , on the artificial island of Palm Jumeirah itself. Although the loan granted - and never returned - was for a higher amount, the property was purchased for 6.3 million dirhams, the equivalent in local currency of 1.25 million euros at the time (just under 2.1 million of dollars). 

In addition to this property, the team from the Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP), in charge of the BES investigation in Portugal, was able to determine the existence in Dubai of several bank accounts from which Silva benefited, at least until the bankruptcy. from the bank in the summer of 2014. 

In just nine months, between August 2013 and May 2014, $3.65 million was transferred from an offshore company controlled by the Espirito Santo Group (GES), Shu-Tian, to Silva’s accounts at Emirates NBD, one from the main banks in Dubai. These accounts were controlled by him through another offshore company, Cronus Enterprises. 

Other amounts, described as bonuses, were paid from GES’s Swiss bank, Banque Privée Espirito Santo (BPES). In an analysis of the files of the BES/Venezuela criminal case, the Expresso reporter found that there was also a transfer of $350,000 in June 2013 to Hanhan and Co. Group SA, an offshore company with an ESBD account from which Silva was a beneficiary, to which monthly transfers of $7,500 were added, for a total of $90,000 over the course of the year. 

That is, in less than a year, and in the midst of the collapse of the BES, Silva received a minimum of four million dollars in bank accounts in Dubai, in addition to the non-refundable loan of 1.9 million with which he bought his apartment in the Palm Jumeirah island. He enough to retire in 2014, at only 53 years old, without having to worry about money for the rest of his life. 

Officially, Silva did not end his employment contract with the entity until May 2017. By then, three years had already passed since the intervention of the Portuguese State in BES and since it changed its name to Novo Banco. 

Silva’s departure from Novo Banco occurred a month before he was detained and interrogated in June 2017, within the framework of the main criminal investigation into the BES, from which an autonomous investigation of the Public Ministry was created in 2021. Portuguese dedicated exclusively to Venezuela. 

During interrogation in 2017, Silva said that his salary at the bank was 8,700 euros per month and that, in the meantime, after the end of his relationship with Novo Banco, he had started working as a consultant for a company of his in Dubai, called Thebes. That day, the investigating judge accepted the prosecutor’s request for house arrest for Silva, for fear that he would flee.

A person walks in front of the headquarters of BES (Banco Espirito Santo) in Lisbon on August 3, 2014, the date of its collapse. Portugal intervened the bank and reconstituted its "good" portfolio under the name of Novo Banco. Credit: Patricia de Melo Moreira / AFP

"His status as a resident in Dubai intrinsically reinforces this danger, especially when the evidence in the summary shows that the accused has significant economic capacity, especially with regard to assets convertible into cash abroad," reads in the main summary of the BES case, in which he was initially charged, before the case later known as BES/Venezuela emerged from him. 

There were reasons, good enough, to fear that Silva would not return to Portugal to face justice. "None of the versions presented by the accused, neither in terms of the facts that were communicated to him nor in terms of how he currently intends to organize his life linked to Portugal, deserve credibility, and even intrinsically contradict several of the arguments presented and the evidence gathered. ", alleged the Prosecutor’s Office. 

Prosecutors also used as an argument, to propose a restriction on his movements, the fact that his ex-wife admitted, when she testified, that she was convinced that Silva would settle permanently in the UAE. 

Indeed, after his arrest, Silva was under house arrest for a year, between 2017 and 2018, in an apartment in Lisbon. He was the only one in the entire main BES process who was in preventive detention. But he managed to leave.

Dubai’s endless excuses

At that moment, the prosecutor took the opportunity to do everything possible to get help from the Emirati authorities. The context was difficult. There was - and still is - no judicial cooperation agreement between Portugal and the UAE. 

In January 2018, Portuguese prosecutors began preparing a letter rogatory. The request was classified as "urgent and confidential." They wanted to have access to the bank statements of the accounts that Silva had in ES Bankers Dubai, Emirates NBD, Standard Chartered Bank and Mashreq Bank, maintained through several offshore companies: Hanam, Gaiado, Bodião, Cronus Enterprises, Tebas Advisory and Services and SDAC Consulting DMCC. 

The Prosecutor’s Office in Portugal seized several assets of the bank manager to gather guarantees to cover the recovery of 3.3 million euros in favor of the State. Among these assets was the apartment in the Tiara Residences condominium in Palm Jumeirah, Dubai. 

The letter sent to the UAE Ministry of Justice was answered in July 2018. In their response, the Dubai authorities complained about the absence of some formal elements. Among them, the problem that the pages of the letter were neither sealed nor signed. But that was not all: the request should have been addressed, they argued, to the "central authority of the UAE represented by the Ministry of Justice" and should have presented "explicit" legal bases, while Portugal should also declare that it would apply a principle of reciprocity if it received requests for assistance from the Emirati judicial authorities in "similar cases". 

In November 2018, the DCIAP returned with a new request, meeting the demands raised. Still, in July 2019, the Emirati Ministry of Justice insisted on the same points, as if they had not been fulfilled. 

The correspondence evolved in strange and unexpected ways. In November 2020, in response to a third request from Portugal, the Emirates claimed something they had not mentioned before: the papers had to be translated into Arabic, not English as in previous requests, and all papers had to be stamped. and signed by the authority making the request, not by the translator. 

In reality, the translator and a DCIAP prosecutor, Olga Barata, had signed all the pages jointly. Apparently, the UAE Ministry of Justice considered that the translator’s signature was unnecessary. But what difference could there be? 

Despite the fact that Portugal had sent all documentation in the required format for the fourth time, in August 2022, the UAE again refused to help. They insisted on the same points and added a new one: they needed copies of the passports of the beneficiaries of the bank accounts mentioned in the application. This issue had not been raised in the previous four years, leading Portuguese applicants to believe that the identification documents submitted earlier were going to be sufficient. 

In January 2023, in her fifth rogatory commission on the subject, the director of the Department of Judicial Cooperation and International Relations of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), Joana Gomes Pereira, decided to change strategy and sent the documentation translated into English , "requesting that the English language be accepted in the translation for reasons of reciprocity, since application No. 3975/2022 sent by Abu Dhabi [ another of the seven emirates that make up the UAE ] to the Portuguese authorities in English and without translation into Portuguese was also accepted". However, the following month, the Emirates responded with the same thing they had demanded before.

According to the BES/Venezuela case file, the exchange of letters ended there. But Joana Gomes Pereira told the Expresso reporter that there was still a sixth rogatory commission sent by Portugal, which has not yet been answered by Dubai. "It seems evident to me that this renewal of the formal reasons for not initiating the cooperation procedure is objectively aimed at making it impossible to obtain a result, positive or negative," she deduced. 

If in the upcoming trial in Portugal João Alexandre Silva is sentenced to a prison sentence and the delivery of assets, and this results in new requests to the Emirates - this time for seizure of assets and extradition -, the director of the Department of Cooperation Judicial of the PGR sees "it is remote that, in the absence of an international instrument on extradition or seizure and distribution of assets, any of these objectives will be achieved."

In the last three years, from 2021 to 2023, according to data provided to Expresso by the PGR, Portugal has sent 17 requests for judicial assistance to the UAE without, so far, having executed any; four of them didn’t even deserve a response. In all cases, a pattern was observed among the Emirati authorities: they systematically raise formal problems, which end up lengthening the exchange of correspondence and which often lead Portuguese prosecutors to give up. 

According to Joana Gomes Pereira, "the Belgian Ministry of Justice is organizing, in its capacity as the country in charge this year of the rotating Presidency of the European Union, a meeting between Central European authorities and representatives of the UAE, precisely to diagnose the vicissitudes of cooperation with the authorities of these States".

But for now, for those who want to make money no matter what, Dubai remains a land of opportunity.

The triangle of Switzerland, Macau and the Emirates

According to the Portuguese Public Ministry, "João Alexandre Silva was tasked by Ricardo Salgado to make contacts in Venezuela with public officials responsible for possible commercial interactions with the GES."

At the same time, Salgado turned to Michel Ostertag, a manager who then served as general director of Gestar, a GES company in Switzerland specialized in trust services. Ostertag founded ICG Private Wealth & Family Office Services in 2012, which immediately opened an office in Dubai, and hired a Portuguese employee, Paulo Murta.

Ricardo Salgado, president of the BES, headed the bribe payment scheme through which Silva funneled $124 million in bribes to Venezuelan officials. Credit: Patricia de Melo Moreira / AFP

Both Ostertag and Murta, through ICG, facilitated the offshore companies through which money passed for corrupt Venezuelans, as was discovered in the 2021 Pandora Papers , an investigation coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). its acronym in English) from a leak of almost 12 million documents. In the spring of 2014, before the BES bankruptcy, ICG managed 82 offshore companies, many of them with problematic beneficiaries, including politically exposed persons. 

In the UAE, Salgado chaired ESBD and, according to the DCIAP indictment, had a trusted administrator, Humberto Coelho, to manage the opening and maintenance of the most sensitive accounts. On the other hand, one of the banker’s collaborators in Switzerland, Jean-Luc Schneider, managed Espirito Santo Enterprises, or ES Enterprises, an offshore company that had accounts in Banque Privée Espirito Santo and from which the money for bribes payable in Dubai came. 

Between 2008, when the plan for Venezuela began to be implemented, and 2014, João Alexandre Silva often traveled with Paulo Murta to organize meetings with public officials in hotel rooms, including the Renaissance Hotel, the Pestana Caracas and the Caracas Palace Hotel. 

"In these meetings, João Alexandre Silva, following orders from Ricardo Salgado, transmitted the latter’s offer," reads the BES/Venezuela case. "Once the contacted Venezuelan officials had accepted the offer, João Alexandre Silva and Paulo Murta presented the solution to make the payments authorized by Ricardo Salgado to these people."

It was a multifaceted team: Ostertag controlled the concealment scheme with the help of Paulo Murta on the ground, Silva served as a liaison with the corrupt in Venezuela, Schneider released the funds in Switzerland and Humberto Coelho supervised the transfers in Dubai. 

This small special operations team managed to route some 124 million dollars in bribes through Dubai, through 31 offshore companies, to 19 Venezuelans between 2009 and 2013. Another 90 million dollars were paid between 2013 and 2014, but no longer It would be through Dubai.  

The level of financial impunity was so great during those years that, in April 2013, faced with the successive transfers of millions of dollars to companies without any activity, the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) had no choice but to finally demand ESDB (Espirito Santo Dubai Bankers) that will prove the origin of the funds obtained by Venezuelan beneficiaries with accounts in that bank. 

At that time, given the new attitude of the Emirati regulator, the money held by Venezuelans began to be transferred to the BPES in Switzerland. Starting in May 2013, all new bribe payments were made to an account opened by ES Enterprises in the Espirito Santo Group’s Swiss bank, and were distributed by subaccounts, each associated with a specific Venezuelan. Other accounts were also opened with Venezuelan beneficiaries in the SFE of Madeira, of which João Alexandre Silva was general director.  

A contract signed in May 2013 between ICG in Switzerland and one of the main GES holding companies, ESI, sought to justify the 124 million paid since 2009. A second contract was signed between ESI and ICG’s subsidiary in Dubai to serve as an alibi for additional payments of $90 million in bribes made through June 2014. In both cases, the amounts were described as remuneration to "business lawyers." 

There was also a third contract of this type between ESI and Shu-Tian, an offshore company used by GES to pay "business lawyers" from Macau, a former Portuguese colony in Chinese territory, today with a status similar to that of Hong Kong. This contract allowed funds associated with another company, Canaima Finance Ltd, whose beneficiary was Coromoto Torres Morán, wife of former Venezuelan vice minister Nervis Villalobos, to be transferred from Switzerland to an account opened in the name of Shu-Tian at the Bank of China in Macau. 

Canaima received 47.8 million dollars from the Espírito Santo Group. The Public Ministry believes that part of that money went to Rafael Ramírez Carreño, Minister of Petroleum and president of the state oil company PDVSA until 2013, currently residing in Italy.

The Portuguese justice indicates that Venezuelan transfers to the BES began in the government of Hugo Chávez but continued in that of Nicolás Maduro, thanks to the cooperation of officials such as Rafael Ramírez. Credit: Juan Barreto / AFP

After the money received by Canaima was transferred to Shu-Tian’s account in Macau, Villalobos instructed a lawyer in September 2014, the month after the BES bankruptcy in Portugal, to pay Jesús Francisco with that money Alemán Ramos, a PDVSA employee in China, a relative of Rafael Ramírez Carreño. 

In November 2014, Jesús Alemán received $12 million paid by Shu-Tian. Nervis Villalobos himself received a total of 11.2 million euros and 6.2 million euros in July 2015 from Shu-Tian’s account and with money from Canaima. In both cases, these amounts ended up in new accounts opened at the Bank of China, far from the risk of embargo in Switzerland or other European countries. 

For Nervis Villalobos, despite all the setbacks he had with the courts of several countries after the fall of the BES and the banker Ricardo Salgado, it was good news. Some of the money was kept safe in China.

For this, João Alexandre Silva had been a providential help. The importance of the Portuguese bank manager for Villalobos and, by extension, for Rafael Ramírez Carreño, is demonstrated in an important detail: the 3.65 million dollars that Silva received in Dubai in three transfers between August 2013 and May 2014 were, In fact, ordered by the former Venezuelan Vice Minister of Energy.

In the investigations carried out by the Prosecutor’s Office in Switzerland on Michel Ostertag, three transfer orders were found dating back to 2013 and originating from Nervis Villalobos. In these orders, addressed to Ostertag, the former official of Hugo Chávez’s government determined three payments - one of 1.35 million dollars, another of 1.3 million dollars and a third of one million dollars - in the name of his company. , Megana International LTD, and Tebas Advisory Services JLT, a consulting firm owned by João Alexandre Silva in the Emirates. 

Although they were made in the name of Megana International and Tebas, the transfers were executed by Ostertag from Shu-Tian’s account at the Bank of China in Macau, where Villalobos’ money was, to Silva’s account at Emirates NBD Dubai, one of his other offshore companies, Cronus. 

The first $1.35 million were transferred in August 2013 for concepts such as "commissions for the first and second quarter of 2013" and "financing of real estate investments." 1.3 million followed in November 2013, justified as "commissions from the third quarter of 2013", and there was another million euros transferred in May 2014, for the concepts of "commissions from the first half of 2014" and, again , "real estate investment financing." 

"These payments were part of a request made by Ricardo Salgado to Nervis Villalobos to remunerate João Alexandre Silva for his success in obtaining funds for a strategic investment in the GES," says the indictment from the Portuguese Public Ministry, presented on last year. That is: the corrupter asked the corrupt person for help to reward the person who had built the bridge between them. Far from the reach of Portuguese justice, one hand washed the other.

Emma Davis