Venezuelan Opposition Leader Leopoldo López’s Cryptocurrency Scams

By Misión Verdad – May 9, 2024

In the context of his failed attempts to disrupt the stability and peace of Venezuela, Leopoldo López has also been dabbling in the cryptocurrency game. His involvement in the PVDSA-Crypto corruption plot is part of his continued attempts to destabilize Venezuela and his ambition to steal the income generated by the Venezuelan oil industry.

In June 2022, López was a signatory, together with a group of 21 activists, of a letter to the US Congress where they expressed support for the digital currency Bitcoin, claiming that “it provides financial inclusion and empowerment because it is open and does not require permits,” and adding that “Bitcoin provided refuge to our compatriots amid the monetary crises in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Venezuela.”

Then, in October of the same year, the opposition leader spoke at the Bitcoin Amsterdam Conference, held in the Netherlands. There he continued with his slogan against the Venezuelan government and claimed with the same tenor that cryptocurrencies “are a possibility for people who are threatened by a regime to transfer their funds to achieve freedom.” At that conference he confessed that he also used part of the Venezuelan assets seized and stolen by the United States through an unconventional mechanism typical of digital banking and outside the traditional controls of the financial system, supposedly destined for “nurses and doctors.” To date, there is no concrete evidence to validate these transactions.

Leopoldo Lopez has been insisting on the promotion of digital exchange mechanisms via Bitcoin for several years now, and is notoriously getting involved in that space with different projects. Here are some facts:

In El Salvador, two Venezuelans lead the Bitcoin implementation team and Chivo Wallet, the government wallet through which cryptocurrencies are exchanged, whose operational and political side is managed by Sara Hanna, a Venezuelan linked to López and Guaidó’s Popular Will party. The technical administration is managed by Lorenzo Rey who, according to various media agencies, is one of the founders of Dash Help, a “support center” that was implemented in Venezuela to make transactions using Dash, another cryptocurrency.
Rey is also one of the founders of a program called Dash Merchant, which was immersed in a scandal when the web portal Dash Watch discovered, through a financial audit, that the Venezuelan company provided inaccurate and misleading documents regarding salary payments: “At the beginning of 2019, financial reports for the last quarter of 2018 showed missing funds.”
López’s relationship with Bitcoin is also linked to his kinship with Thor Halvorssen Mendoza, who is the president of the NGO Human Rights Foundation, where bitcoiner Alex Gladstein serves as CEO.

On the other hand, two events occurred on April 29 this year in relation to cryptocurrencies:

Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab gave a press conference in which he reported on the findings obtained from the investigation into the PDVSA-Crypto corruption case: in the confessions of one of the accused, Samark López, Leopoldo López’s name appears.
Almost in parallel, Leopoldo López presented his report “Crypto in Venezuela: Two Sides of a Coin,” with the US think-tank Wilson Center.

Venezuelan Far-Right Politicians Leopoldo López and Julio Borges Benefited From PDVSA Corruption Plot

López’s report lacks solid foundations and repeats imperialist narratives that are weaponized against the Venezuelan government. It criticizes the Venezuelan government’s sanctions evasion practices while, to some extent, acknowledges the negative impact of these measures on Venezuelan oil trade: “As Western sanctions cut off Venezuela’s access to sell oil through reputable financial institutions, the regime turned to cryptocurrencies to conduct transactions.”

López warns that there is a “different facet” of cryptocurrencies, and gets entangled in their contradictions. For example, he supports the imposition of sanctions against Venezuela while recognizing their negative impact on the country’s economy: “International sanctions have hindered traditional remittance flows. Expats have turned to cryptocurrencies due to their low transaction fees and fast transfer speeds that contrast sharply with traditional methods affected by sanctions.”

Referring to the “Heroes for Health” platform, another of his big scams, López says that to transfer the supposed funds used in that program the cryptocurrency system was used. It was also used in the supposed “social aid” that he provided during the pandemic.

Finally, he lays out recommendations to decision-makers in Washington: he begins by insisting on the continued imposition of sanctions. In fact, he calls for Venezuelan cryptocurrency operators to be included in the Specially Designated Nationals List of the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and be subjected to sanctions.

López’s desperation originates from his desire to ensure his own profits due to possible future regulations on cryptocurrencies that could affect his business model, given the United States’ cautious approach regarding cryptocurrencies, as according to the US government these currencies currently do not offer widespread economic benefits and are mainly a speculative investment.

After all, in Leopoldo López’s worldview, cryptocurrencies should not facilitate Venezuelan oil sales that generate significant revenues for the state that could assist in providing benefits for the population. Instead their function should be preserving his own network of unchecked funding to foundations, NGOs or extremist political cells in Venezuela, entities that he considers as a crucial component of his broader destabilization strategy against the nation.

(Misión Verdad)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/SC/DZ