The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has imposed sanctions on the money and property of Venezuelan individuals and companies whom it believes to be involved in a corrupt US$2.4 billion scheme designed to take advantage of the Government of Venezuela’s currency exchange practices.

OFAC is taking this action under the aegis of Executive Order 13850, targeting seven people including former Venezuelan National Treasurer Claudia Patricia Diaz Guillen and Raul Antonio Gorrin Belisario, whom it accuses of bribing the Venezuelan Office of the National Treasury (the Oficina Nacional del Tesoro or ONT) in order to conduct illicit foreign exchange operations in Venezuela. It has sanctioned five other people and 23 entities for taking part in the bribery scheme and has identified one private aircraft as 'blocked property.' (The entirety of OFAC's sanctions scheme is known as the "blocked persons' regime" and the people it sanctions are generally known as "specially designated nationals" or SDNs). Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin is accusing the current people and entities of benefiting themselves at the expense of the Venezuelan people. He says that they stole billions of dollars from the Venezuelan people after 2008, under the watch of two Venezuelan national treasurers, Alejandro Jose Andrade Cedeno and Claudia Patricia Diaz Guillen. In November last year, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida sentenced Andrade to 10 years in prison for accepting more than $1 billion in bribes for his role in the racket.

The ONT holds assets in British bonds, US dollars and bolivars (the native currency) and these are all that it has available to spend on Venezuelan government operations. At times when it lacked enough bolivars for government projects, treasurer Andrade used a series of exchange houses, or casas de bolsa, to exchange dollars for bolivars. As part of the scheme, according to the Americans, exchange houses sold dollars for bolivars on parallel markets at a higher, black-market exchange rate than the official government rate. These exchange houses kept the difference between the black market rate and the official government rate, resulting in massive profits for them when they provided the ONT with dollars. Only exchange houses approved by the ONT were allowed to conduct bolivar-to-dollar exchanges with the Government of Venezuela. As treasurers, Andrade and later Diaz were in a position to decide which exchange houses received government contracts. This, according to the US Treasury, was the source of the corruption.

An accusatory note on the Treasury website states: "In return for their selection as the only currency exchange houses approved by the ONT, Gorrin and Gonzalez, another Venezuelan businessman, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Andrade. Andrade facilitated the continuation of the bribery scheme by introducing Gorrin to Andrade’s successor, Diaz, when he left the ONT. Gorrin compensated Andrade for introducing him to Diaz."

America's Trump administration has been making a point of asking banks to block Venezuelan property recently. Last year in January the Treasury sanctioned four Venezuelan Government officials that it associated with corruption and 'oppression'; in March it targeted another four; in May it targeted Diosdado Cabello Rondón "for being a current or former official"; in September it targeted four members of President Nicolas Maduro’s inner circle: his politically active wife Cilia Flores; the Executive Vice President Delcy Eloina Rodriguez Gomez; the Minister of Communications and Information Jorge Jesus Rodriguez Gomez; and the Minister of Defence Vladimir Padrino Lopez. All property and interests in property of these individuals and entities that are in the United States or in the possession or control of US persons must be blocked and reported to OFAC.

Venezuela, meanwhile, is descending into economic chaos. A survey by three universities found that three-quarters of Venezuelans had lost an average of 19 pounds in weight in the first half of 2017. The entire edifice of the welfare state depends on the price of oil, which has declined in recent years, while corruption and robbery are rampant. According to the 2018 Global Wealth Migration Review, published by the AfrAsia Bank, China topped the list of 10,000 HNW individuals migrating to other countries (mostly to Canada, Australia and the US) in 2017 while Venezuela occupied the 11th slot with 1,000, mostly going to the United States.