Venezuela's Vice President, Jose Vicente Rangel [UID  14237], has sadly detailed the truth of the money laundering operation in which Sr. Antonini served as a "bagman," or bulk-cash courier. We doubt that he would be making these statements without sufficient evidence.

The scenario he describes as follows:

• Senior PdVsa executives purchase extremely large amounts of their own agency's bonds with Venezuelan currency. The source of these funds is unknown, but since we are talking about literally several hundred billion Bolivars, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, the only place that so much money exists is the region is in narcotics profits. Are they fronting for the Colombian Cartels? Since arrested narcotics trafficker Walter Alexander del Nogal [UID 441492], the suspected supervisor of Antonini, was named by one of the imprisoned cartel members recently as the primary money launderer in Venezuela, the answer can only be yes.
  

• The bonds are then sold for dollars, using a particular Venezuelan bank that is a subsidiary of a bank in Argentina. That institution has, of course, denied any involvement from its headquarters in Buenos Aires.
  

• Thereafter, the funds are either transferred administratively to the bank's Argentinean parent, or are delivered in cash, utilising the business jets that were identified as having taken PdVsa executives and employees to Argentina several times.
  

• How much money is involved? Fired PdVSA executive Diego Uzcategui, who was PdVsa's primary man in Argentina, and whose own son was aboard the fateful Antonini flight, is reported to be holding $200m in Venezuela, that he cannot smuggle into Argentina, due to the increased Argentinean customs scrutiny that has followed the Antonini seizure. Remember, it was Uzcategui who requested that Antonini be carried as a passenger aboard the Caracas-Buenos Aires business jet flight chartered by Enarsa, Argentina's government petrochemical entity.
  

• How much are these money launderers earning for their trouble? Arrested narcotics trafficker Walter del Nogal is rumoured to be personally worth more than $500m. He reportedly gave his ex-wife in Miami $3m in cash.

We hope that Argentinean prosecutors will now begin to expand the Antonini investigation into what is obviously a major money laundering operation, involving the covert movement of huge amounts of wealth into one of their country's financial institutions.

Will Venezuelan authorities charge the corrupt Pdvsa executives with money laundering? Vice President Rangel has said that he has turned all evidence in his possession this matter over to the Interior minister, and that a law enforcement investigation is in progress. We will be closely monitoring its progress.