The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida sentenced a former Swiss bank executive to prison for laundering $1.2 billion worth of stolen funds from Venezuela's state-owned oil company. In addition to the ten-year prison sentence, to be followed by three years of supervised release, the Swiss bank executive was ordered to pay a $50,000 fine and a forfeiture money judgment of $600,000.
According to the DOJ, Matthias Krull pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering in August 2018. As part of his plea, Mr. Krull admitted that he attracted private clients, particularly from Venezuela, to the bank. The DOJ states that he laundered over a billion dollars' worth of funds that were embezzled from Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. ("PDVSA"), Venezuela's state-owned oil company. The network of money launderers, which allegedly included complicit money managers, brokerage firms, banks and real estate investment firms in the United States and elsewhere, also used real estate and false-investment schemes to hide the funds taken from PDVSA.
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