Banker Gets Probation in Money-Laundering Case

A member of a politically prominent Venezuelan family was sentenced to one year’s probation Friday for illegally structuring a $20,000 cash transaction to avoid bank-reporting requirements.

Esperanza DeSaad, 57, former manager of the Miami office of Banco Industrial de Venezuela, was also fined $50,000 after entering a guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder in Los Angeles.

The case against DeSaad grew out of Operation Casablanca, a two-year Customs Service probe of global drug money laundering.

One of 100 individuals and banks indicted in 1998, DeSaad is the sister of a former Venezuelan finance minister. Her father once served in the national legislature.

DeSaad, a resident immigrant in the United States, said after her sentencing that she decided to plead guilty to “restore peace and tranquillity to my family. We are an honest and honorable family and what the prosecution has painted me out to be is not true.”

In 1999, a federal jury in Los Angeles convicted DeSaad and two co-defendants of laundering millions of dollars in narcotics proceeds.

But U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman, who presided at the trial, subsequently nullified DeSaad’s conviction, declaring that she had been illegally entrapped and had not known she was handling drug money. Prosecutors appealed Friedman’s ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the matter was pending.

As part of a plea agreement signed Friday, both sides said they would drop the appeal.

DeSaad admitted in the agreement that on Feb. 9, 1998, she arranged for co-defendant Carmen Salima Yrigoyen to cash four $5,000 checks at nearby banks in Miami. Federal law requires reporting of cash transactions of $10,000 or more. Circumventing the regulations is known as structuring, a crime punishable by a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The plea deal does not affect DeSaad’s co-defendants. Salima, 45, a lawyer and former judge in Venezuela, was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison, and Carlos Izurieta Valery, 54, is serving five years and 10 months.