Leonardo González Dellán’s LinkedIn page promotes him as an entrepreneur and restaurateur. A U.S. Treasury Department sanctions notice calls him a testaferro, a financial front man hiding money for corrupt Venezuelan politicians. But to global giant Credit Suisse, he went by another name: client.
González was sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2019 for his alleged role in managing accounts through which bribes were paid to Venezuelan politicians as part of a corruption scheme worth $2.4 billion.
Well before he was sanctioned, González was a key player in the complicated bond-based parallel market that sprang out of Venezuela’s attempts at currency control in the early 2000s.
The system, centered around brokerage houses known as casas de bolsa, allowed investors to take advantage of the difference between two government-set rates of the Venezuelan bolivar and the black-market rate. Many earned billions of dollars that were moved out of Venezuela and into Swiss banks, condos in Miami, luxury yachts, and cars.
The so-called permuta market’s years of operation, between 2003 and 2010, became what some have dubbed the “savage years,” a nod toward the feeding frenzy it sparked among financial brokers — many of whom, like González Dellán, were clients of Credit Suisse.
But Credit Suisse’s involvement in Venezuela’s economic meltdown went even further than servicing corrupt elites. Back in the 1990s, one of the bank’s employees played a key role in creating the foundation for a system that, while technically legal, would be undermined by corruption.
Credit Suisse employee Francisco “Pancho” Illarramendi led a team at the bank to develop currency trading mechanisms that would later become instrumental to the permuta market. Years later, after he left the bank to set up his own hedge fund, Illarramendi would be convicted of running a massive fraud using that very market.
Amid the vast fortunes made by some, this frenzied period was marked by human rights violations and endemic corruption in Venezuela’s self-described socialist government.
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