The man who drove a Ferrari was a football club president and held the title of honorary Consul for the Republic of Georgia, all arranged by UN-Tourism Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili. This man is Víctor de Aldama, the alleged mastermind in the high-profile Koldo criminal case in Spain.
If this involvement wasn’t enough, the UN-Tourism leader planned with Aldama to create banks in Georgia to divert fuel funds, according to a report yesterday by The Objective newspaper.
According to the report, they discussed banks and a bonded warehouse or refinery in Georgia that would allow them to bring fuel to Spain in 2022.
After two years of attempts and a title denial in between, Villafuel SL finally obtained the hydrocarbon operator license in September.
The operation had been planned since August 2020, when Claudio Rivas met Víctor de Aldama through Carmen Pano.
Businesswoman Carmen Pano has confirmed before the Spanish Supreme Court that she handed over 90,000 euros to the PSOE (The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party of the Community of Madrid ) headquarters in October 2020 on the orders of commissioner Víctor de Aldama. However, according to Europa Press, one of the suspects’ partners, Claudio Rivas, has denied this.
The knowledge of the oil sector and the latter’s government contacts made them a successful tandem. But there were other actors in the corporate structure, seemingly secondary, but as relevant as they were necessary. This is the case of the Secretary General of the World Tourism Organization, Zurab Pololikashvili.
Aldama had met Zurab Pololikashvili through his friend Javier Hidalgo. The Aldama-Pololikashvili-Hidalgo trio connected with Begoña Gómez in September 2019, at the 23rd UNWTO General Assembly in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, was invited to the meeting of African ministers at that time as director of the IE African Center and later secured sponsorship from a Globalia subsidiary, Wakalua, for the chair’s startup awards.
But the alliance began to fray after the Air Europa bailout.
Internal tensions within the Hidalgo holding company, suspicions by its founder, Pepe Hidalgo, toward the “swindler” Aldama, and his maneuvering during the bailout negotiations, led Globalia to remove Javier Hidalgo from his role as CEO of the company a few months after the Cabinet approved the move. Aldama’s contract was terminated.
Aldama-Polikashvili Alliance continues
That happened in April 2021. But the Aldama-Pololikashvili alliance continued.
Proof of this was the awarding of Aldama the title of Honorary Consul of Georgia two months later, in June 2021. This title does not carry the privileges associated with career diplomatic positions, such as a passport or diplomatic pouch. Still, it does have the Diplomatic ID, issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which offers certain economic and commercial privileges in the country of origin that issues the title, usually in terms of visas or tax exemptions.
The Key is Oil
This document streamlines international travel and contacts to support business. By June 2021, Aldama was already involved in oil.
He wasn’t just a commission agent but another operator in the network designed with his partner, Claudio Rivas, as evidenced by the messages he exchanged with other plot members, to which THE OBJECTIVE Newspaper in pain has had access.
In one of them, sent around the time of these events, Aldama asked, “Which platt are you buying from?” in response to an “urgent” transaction he was conducting with the US. In industry jargon, Platts are the suppliers that provide prices to the company.
Pololikashvili and the Georgian banks
Aldama had spent almost a year designing the corporate infrastructure of hydrocarbons alongside Claudio Rivas in Portugal and Spain. Aldama and Venezuelan native Rivas would eventually deploy a complex international network dedicated to importing Venezuelan oil, which they refined in the Dominican Republic, a loyal supporter of Zurab in the upcoming election.
This was a way to circumvent the sanctions on purchasing Venezuelan crude oil imposed by the European Union and the United States since 2017. The European sanctions affected a second country: Russia.
Zurab Pololikashvili’s role in this oil-money laundering-banking fraud
Here, the role of Zurab Pololikashvili and his prominent position in Georgia, where he held the positions of Minister of Economy, Georgia’s plenipotentiary ambassador to Spain, and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, were key.
According to direct sources speaking to THE OBJECTIVE, at the end of 2022, Víctor de Aldama received a visit from Zurab Pololikashvili at his UNWTO headquarters on Antonio Maura Street in Madrid.
Also in the room was Leonor González Pano, administrator of the real-estate company from which the La Alcaidesa villa was purchased for Minister José Luis Ábalos.
Zurab entered the office and looked at the young woman with suspicion, to which Aldama reassured him with an expression that denotes the enormous closeness between them:
Aldama to Zurab: Brother, Don’t Worry
“Brother, don’t worry. I’ve never let you down. Leonor is like my sister .” They began to talk about the need to open new banks in Georgia to channel the funds derived from the sale of fuel. It was a quick, brief meeting between the two standing in Aldama’s office, in which it was clear that “it was not the first time they had talked about banking licenses.”
“They talked about creating banks and a bonded warehouse in the Canary Islands, a refinery in Georgia, which would allow them to bring fuel to Spain.”
Bypassing Sanctions on Russia
A link to the Georgian capital would also avoid sanctions on Russian crude. “Aldama told him: ‘We must hurry up with the banking licenses.’
Zurab replied that he needed a little time. He couldn’t do it as quickly as they wanted, and they had to travel to speak with someone in Georgia.
The broker diligently organized the trip “in the coming weeks.” “I’ll look for a private plane so we can go, Claudio, you and I can look into it,”
The WhatsApp messages Aldama exchanged with some of his partners regarding creating banking licenses with Zurab’s help were from those dates, the first on September 17, 2022.
The new Zurab banking license scheme
Three days later, on September 20, 2022, Aldama contacted the same businessman again, demanding to know “which African country he had contacts with.”
Sources consulted by THE OBJECTIVE explained at the time that Guinea-Conakry was the country where attempts were made to open banking licenses to channel funds derived from hydrocarbon fraud.
That same year, former minister José Luis Ábalos, who Aldama used to expedite the granting of the license to Villafuel in exchange for a bribe, the La Alcaidesa villa in Cádiz, signed a deposit contract with a Malaysian company in exchange for a banking license.
To keep the face, Russia was suspended from UN-Tourism on April 27, 2022
Corruption
José Luis Ábalos‘s ex-partner recently appeared as a witness in the Spanish Supreme Court, where she ratified what the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and Judge Leopoldo Puente described criminal evidence against the former minister: It was Ábalos who arranged for him to acquire the luxury home that a businessman paid for, and it was Ábalos who arranged for him to be placed in a public company.
The transaction was carried out through the same company that later took advantage of Ábalos’ trips to Guinea to open banks in the African country, where, in turn, a contract was signed for a sovereign debt purchase operation.
According to sources familiar with the operation, the obsession with creating their own banks in different parts of the world stems from the possibility of “moving money” from a fraudulent business that was sometimes “conducted through cryptocurrencies .”
This required converting large amounts of money, which in most cases encountered difficulties on the part of financial institutions. Considering this “multi-billion-dollar scheme” on a global scale, affecting a dozen countries and far exceeding the €182 million in VAT fraud, the need to own a bank was “critical.
