Orlando Alfonso Contreras Saab ("Contreras") was a Venezuelan citizen.
Alvaro Pulido Vargas, a/k/a German Enrique Rubio Salas, a/k/a "Cuchi" ("Pulido"), a Colombian citizen, controlled several companies, including Group Grand Limited and Asasi Food FZE, that obtained contracts from Venezuelan state-owned entities to provide food and medicine to Venezuela.
Jose Gregorio Vielma-Mora was the Governor of the Venezuelan State of Tachira from 2012 through 2017. Vielma-Mora oversaw Comercializadora de Bienes Y Servicios Del Estado Tachira ("COBISERTA''), which was a company owned and controlled by the State of Tachira that, among other things, purchased food for the people of Tachira.
Emmanuel Enrique Rubio Gonzalez ("Rubio"), a Colombian citizen, was the son of Pulido.
Carlos Rolando Lizcano Manrique ("Lizcano") was a Colombian citizen.
Ana Guillermo Luis ("Guillermo") was a dual Venezuelan and Spanish citizen.
According to the documents in this case, between about 2016 and September 2019, Contreras and his co-conspirators, including Pulido, Vielma-Mora, Rubio, Lizcano, and Guillermo, engaged in a scheme to bribe Venezuelan officials to obtain multi-million dollar contracts with the Venezuelan government for the production, importation, and distribution of food and medicine to the people of Venezuela under the government's Comite Local de Abastecimiento y Produccion ("CLAP'') program. On October 14, 2016, Group Grand Limited, a company owned and controlled by Pulido and a co-conspirator, obtained a contract from Comercializadora de Bienes Y Servicios Del Estado Tachira ("COBISERTA"), a Venezuelan state entity that purchased food for a Venezuelan state, to import and distribute approximately 10 million boxes of food under the CLAP program at $34 per box for a total contract amount of approximately $340,000,000. Although the co-conspirators knew that the actual cost of producing, importing, and distributing the food boxes was far less than $34 per box, they agreed to make COBISERTA pay an inflated price so that the co-conspirators could use the additional funds to pay bribes to Vielma-Mora and other Venezuelan government officials and to obtain millions of dollars of corrupt proceeds from the scheme.
On September 11, 2023, the DOJ filed a single count information in the Southern District of Florida against Contreras alleging a conspiracy to violate the antibribery provisions of the FCPA.
On November 2, 2023, Contreras entered into a plea agreement. On December 8, 2023, the court preliminarily ordered Contreras to forfeit $5,947,188.
On February 16, 2024, the court sentenced Contreras to six months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release and ordered him to pay a fine of $40,000 plus a mandatory assessment of $100.
In a related proceeding initiated on October 7, 2021, the DOJ filed a two count indictment in the Southern District of Florida against Pulido, Vielma-Mora, Rubio, Lizcano, and Guillermo alleging a conspiracy to commit money laundering as well as direct money laundering violations.
