MADRID (AP) - A judge in Andorra has charged 28 people, including former officials in Venezuela, with money laundering offenses over a kickbacks-for-contracts scheme that plundered $2 billion from the Venezuelan state oil company between 2007 and 2012. According to a report by the BBC online, prosecutors allege that they were part of a network of corrupt officials who received $2.3bn in bribes from companies in return for lucrative contracts with Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA. Investigating magistrate Canolic Mingorance issued the indictments on Thursday, wrapping up a five-year investigation into opaque deposits in the Banca Privada d'Andorra, or BPA, according to court documents seen by The Associated Press. On Thursday, a judge in Andorra, a tiny country located between France and Spain, charged 28 people, including former high-ranking Venezuelan officials, with receiving up to $2.3 billion in kickbacks to grease the wheels for the oil company, PDVSA. According to the BBC online the list of those charged includes Diego Salazar, who is the cousin of former Oil Minister Rafael Ramírez, as well as two men who served as Deputy Energy Ministers in the government of Hugo Chávez. Among those accused are BPA officials; former Venezuelan vice ministers Nervis Villalobos and Javier Alvarado; and Diego Salazar, the high-powered cousin of Rafael Ramirez, who ran PDVSA from 2004 to 2013 and was a close aide of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. In 2015, Andorra intervened in the private bank after the United States Treasury Department accused it of laundering money from groups in China, Russia and Venezuela. Spain agreed to extradite Villalobos as part of the same case, but Ramirez's former deputy at PDVSA can't be sent to the U.S. until he is tried by Spanish courts in two separate cases. She alleges that the accused "joined forces to take control of PDVSA's public tendering as well as energy infrastructure projects run by PDVSA's subsidiaries, Corpoelec and Electricity of Caracas".
28 former Venezuelan officials are charged with corruption by a judge in Andorra.