MIAMI: A top Venezuelan businessman close to President Nicolas Maduro’s government has sued the U.S. Department of Treasury, alleging he’s the victim of a false campaign identifying him as a international narcotics kingpin.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday by Samark Lpez in Washington federal court said sanctions in 2017 designating him a drug kingpin had devastated his wealth, reputation and economic livelihood.
The lawsuit raises the stakes in one of the most far-reaching of dozens of sanctions cases brought against Venezuelan insiders in recent years and could undermine furtive attempts by the Biden administration to support a negotiated solution to the country’s long running political impasse.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, in 2017 accused Lpez of serving as a frontman for his friend and then Vice President Tareck El Aissami, who was sanctioned the same day.
The two were later criminally charged in New York federal court for allegedly breaking those sanctions when they used several Miami based vendors to arrange chartered flights to Russia and elsewhere. In 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement added them to their list of the most-wanted fugitives.
The 46-year-old Lpez, who also has Italian citizenship, has maintained his innocence throughout and indeed neither he nor El Aissami have ever been charged with narcotics trafficking or money laundering a key tenant of the lawsuit alleging he was being unfairly targeted.
Nonetheless, Lpez has seen more than $160 million in U.S. assets including a Gulfstream 200 jet, two yachts and a $12.5 million Miami mansion seized by U.S. courts and handed over to Americans pursuing separate legal claims against the drug-funded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The 2017 sanctions against Lpez and El Aissami make no mention of the Colombian rebel group even as they tie El Aissami to cocaine shipments carried out by Mexican cartels as well as previously targeted Colombian and Venezuelan drug traffickers.
OFACs allegations and its supporting evidence are false, if not entirely fabricated, according to the complaint. Lopez is an international businessman whose reputation has been maligned and whose livelihood has been seriously threatened by Defendants unlawful actions and libelous claims.
The complaint also argues that Lpez couldnt have acted on behalf of a drug kingpin, as alleged by Treasury, because El Aissami was not a sanctioned trafficker at the time of their alleged business dealings together.
Russ Dallen, who tracks litigation involving Venezuela as head of Miami-based Caracas Capital Markets, says Lpez’s lawsuit may be more about accessing the classified intelligence that the U.S. government has about his and El Aissami’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking than actually getting the sanctions removed.
He pointed out that a lawsuit seeking the delisting of another target of U.S. sanctions, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, was recently dismissed by a federal judge who ruled that U.S. officials had acted lawfully. Lpez is being represented by the same attorney, Washington-based sanctions expert Erich Ferrari.
Unlike in criminal proceedings, targets of sanctions don’t have the same due process rights to evidence and information. However, designations found to be arbitrary or an abuse of discretion are considered unlawful.
Much of the evidence compiled against Lpez came from heavily-redacted reports and news reports, according to the complaint. Among the relief sought by the lawsuit is a court order seeking to disclose heavily redacted portions of memos used by OFAC to support its designation.
The U.S. Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Follow Goodman on Twitter: @APjoshgoodman
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here.
Comments
0 comment